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THE ART OF PERFORMANCE
A CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY
edited by
GREGORY BATTCOCK AND ROBERT NICKAS
"

The Art of Performance
A Critical Anthology
1984
Edited By: Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas

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This UbuWeb Edition edited by Lucia della Paolera
2010

#

The original edition was published by

E.P. DUTTON, INC. NEW YORK

For G. B.

Copyright @ 1984 by the Estate of Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and
retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for
inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

Published in the United States by E. P. Dutton, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York,
N.Y. 10016

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-53323
ISBN: 0-525-48039-0

Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Vito Acconci: "Notebook: On Activity and Performance." Reprinted from Art and Artists 6, no.
2 (May l97l), pp. 68-69, by permission of Art and Artists and the author.

Russell Baker: "Observer: Seated One Day At the Cello." Reprinted from The New York
Times, May 14, 1967, p. lOE, by permission of The New York Times. Copyright @ 1967 by The New
York Times Company.

David Bourdon: "An Eccentric Body of Art." Reprinted from Saturday Review of the Arts 1, no. 2
(February 3, 1973), pp. 30-32, by permission of Saturday Review of the Arts and the author.

Cee S. Brown: "Performance Art: A New Form of Theatre, Not a New Concept in Art."
Copyright @ 1983 by Cee S. Brown. Printed by permission of the author.

Chris Burden and Jan Butterfield: Through the Night Softly." Reprinted from Arts 49, no. 7
(March 1975), pp. 68-72, by permission of Arts and the authors.

For their help in the preparation of this anthology, I wish to thank David Shapiro, Barbara
Goldner, and Cyril Nelson. I am also grateful to the Sonnabend Gallery, Ronald Feldman Fine
Arts Inc., the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, and Holly Solomon Gallery for kindly providing access
to their photographic files.
$

CONTENTS

Introduction


Part 1: Historical Introduction

Attanasio Di Felice: Renaissance Performance: Notes on Prototypical Artistic Actions in the
Age of the Platonic Princes

RoseLee Goldberg: Performance: A Hidden History

Annabelle Henkin Melzer: The Dada Actor and Performance Theory

Ken Friedman: Fluxus Performance

RoseLee Goldberg: Performance: The Golden Years


Part 2: Theory and Criticism

Michael Kirby: On Acting and Not-Acting

Cee S. Brown: Performance Art: A New Form of Theatre, Not a New Concept in Art

Franois Pluchart: Risk as the Practice of Thought

Peter Gorsen: The Return of Existentialism in Performance Art

Wayne Enstice: Performance Arts Coming of Age

David Shapiro: Poetry and Action: Performance in a Dark Time

Herbert Molderings: Life Is No Performance: Performance by Jochen Gerz


Part 3: The Artists

David Bourdon: An Eccentric Body of Art

Vito Acconci: Notebook: On Activity and Performance

Robin White: An Interview with Terry Fox

Chris Burden and Jan Butterfield: Through the Night Softly

Les Levine: Artistic

Rob La Frenais: An Interview with Laurie Anderson

David Shapiro: Notes on Einstein on the Beach
From Jail to Jungle: The Work of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik
%

INTRODUCTION

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a
hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an
object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it
we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is
our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective
movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception
of things.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

[Performance] really is an attempt at synthesizing communication. It's an attempt at a new
communication. But the only people this art exists for are the people who are there. And it's the
only time the art exists.
TERRY FOX

I dream of the day when I shall create sculptures that breathe, perspire, cough, laugh, yawn,
smirk, wink, pant, dance, walk, crawl and move among people as shadows move along people.
DAVID MEDALLA

Before man was aware of art he was aware of himself. Awareness of the person is, then, the
first art. In performance art the figure of the artist is the tool for the art. It is the art.
GREGORY BATTCOCK
4


The final epigraph comes from The Art of Performance, the catalogue to an exhibition of
performances held in Venice in the summer of 1979, from which the title of this book was
chosen. The exhibition was only one of many international festivals and symposia presented
between 1977 and 1980 in New York, Montreal, and primarily, in Europe. In addition to
providing an official acknowledgment of the form, these events clearly identified performance as
the art form most characteristic of the 1970s.

What was most startling about these events and what set them apart from most traditional
exhibitions up to that time, as the Battcock quote suggests, was their emphasis on the selection of
artists over, or rather than, artworks. This was certainly the rule rather than the exception. In
many cases the organizers of these events saw the artworks at the same time as the public, not in
advance of them. So, in presenting artists whose work was live, in real time, they were taking a risk
(along with the artists), one to which they
were historically unaccustomed. Yet, take it they did, as the substantial number of festivals
staged during the late 1970s, as well as the staggering amount of performances presented at
them, would indicate. And although these events generated an equally substantial amount of
theories, questions, and lively dialogue, the term performance, in use since the early years of the
decade, was always loosely defined. It remains so; then, as now, encompassing a broad area of
activity by a wide variety of artists with diverse styles, methods, and concerns.

This lack of a strict definition, however, was not necessarily bad. For a number of reasons it
proved advantageous to the artists and to the development of the form. performance was suited
to experimentation in ways that traditional forms such as painting and sculpture, with their
restrictions and physical limitations, were not, neither could they expect to be. Undefined, there
were no rules to break. Artists were able to employ the widest range of subject matter, using
virtually any medium or material; they could present their work at any time, for any duration of
time, at the location of their choosing, in direct contact with their audience. Artists who came to
performance were able to investigate their relationship with their audience, from whom they had
previously been far removed. It can be said that prior to performance, art's audience saw the work
&
of artists, the art product, with greater regularity than it saw the artist or the production of art.
With performance it was simultaneously witness to both. As such, artists had new access to the
reception of their workno longer relying solely on critics and dealers, with their own interests at
stakeand they achieved a degree of control over the presentation and destination of their work.
In addition, performance artists were liberated from the art object and all it entailed. This
liberation offered the possibility of moving toward an art in which the idea would dominate.
Performance, like Conceptual art, would enable the artist to shun mere pictorial values in favor of
true visual communication: art as a vehicle for ideas and action. All of this meant that art no
longer had to conform to established formats, and it would never be quite the same again.

Undefined, performance was independent of current trends and traditional forms, and this
independence guaranteed, for a time, that performance art would remain controlled and guided
by the artists who originated the form. So, the lack of a strict definition was indeed an advantage,
for without clear and determined boundaries, performance was an open territory from its very
beginnings. In the early 1970s, then, this was what attracted artists to performance.

As Michel Benamou has written, "One might ask what causes this pervading need to act out
art which used to suffice itself on the page or the museum wall? What is this new presence, and
how has it replaced the presence which poems and pictures silently proffered before? Has
everything from politics to poetics become theatrical?"
5
For performance artists such as Vito
Acconci and Stuart Brisley, it would seem that at some point the art was no longer wholly
sufficient on the page or the museum wall.

Brisley, one of the pioneers of performance in England, had produced objects up to 1966, by
which time he had "reached a crisis point. I couldn't go on working with material," he claimed, "it
had arrived at its own conclusion and I had to go a stage further." That stage further was to be a
turning point for Brisley, whose new material became process, a "material" he could use "without
actually making an object, and that was a great release."
6


Before coming to performance, to "streetworks" such as Following Piece (1969) and to
"performance situations" such as Claim (1971), for which he was to become well known, Vito
Acconci was a poet. In discussing his work with language, he described the page "as a field for
action" and his use of the page "as a model space, a performance area in miniature or abstract
form." Acconci's progression from "movement over a page" to his own movement in space should
not be seen as evidencing a replacement of the presence of language by performance but as its
extension. In fact, Acconci has suggested as much: "The page doesn't compete with elements
outside but is used, instead, alongside them. Use [the] page as the start of an event that keeps
going, off the page; use the page to fix the boundaries of an event, or a series of events, that take
place in outside space."
7


Thus, performance can be seen not only as a new presence that has "replaced the presence
which poems and pictures silently proffered before" but as an extension of their possibilities,
perhaps without any substitution or replacement. Something that is replaced is not always
superseded, but can be said to have been restored. As the body artist Gina Pane has stated, "Our
entire culture is based on the representation of the body. Performance doesn't so much annul
painting as help out the birth of a new painting based on different explanations and functions of
the body in art."
8
Consider the following recollection of Jannis Kounellis, "In 1960 I did a
continuous performance, first in my studio and then at the Galeria Tartaruga in Roma, in which I
stretched unsized canvases over all the walls in the room, and painted letters over them which I
sang. The problem in those days was to establish a new kind of
painting
9
For Kounellis, who once remarked, "One needs to consider that the gallery is a
dramatic, theatrical cavity,"
10
performance did not replace the presence of pictures but restored
painting. This is a situation not unlike that identified by Roselee Goldberg in her essay
'
"Performance: A Hidden History" in which artists "attempted to resolve problematic issues in
performance."

Still, why this "pervading need to act out art?" part of the answer may be found with artists
who had neither "reached a crisis point" nor sought to explore "outside space" nor to resolve
their problems in performance. Artists like Mary Beth Edelson, who, oddly enough, "never really
intended to do performance, but," she explained, "with certain exhibitions I felt an imperative to
act out what I was trying to saymostly for clarity and to intensify the statement."
11
This
intensification of the statement is, perhaps, one of the primary reasons artists were and still are
drawn to performance. Performance enabled artists to articulate their ideas in action, to set them
in motion. Although some of the ideas were not always adequately articulated or, for that matter,
worthy of communication, authentically new approaches to art as a form of visual communication
were to be explored. We are reminded of Merleau-
Ponty's idea of the body as "the visible form of our intentions," of Fox's belief in "a new
communication," of a claim made by Lucy R. Lippard for performance as "the most immediate
art form, which aspires to the immediacy of political action itself. Ideally," she continued,
"performance means getting down to the bare bones of aesthetic communication-artist/self
confrontins audience/society."
l2


Historically, this ideal would be found in Russia in the 1920s with the "living newspaper"
groups that performed in colleges and clubs, in factories and in the streets, presenting a "collage
of facts," a montage of political events and headlines "chosen by preference from the facts of
everyday life."
l3
In more recent times we find artists such as Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche who,
with performances such as Guerrilla Art Action in Front of The Metropolitan Museum in New York
(1969), protested publicly against the manipulation of art and artists by cultural institutions and
big business.
14
Parallels to activities of this nature would include performances such as Terry Fox's
Defoliation Joseph Beuys's political lectures and dialogues, and performances such as The Boxing
Match for Direct Democracy (1972), as well as a large body of feminist work. Leslie Labowitz and
Suzanne Lacy, for example, presented In Mourning and in Rage (1977), a performance-protest
"against the Hillside Strangler murdersa group of women [who] had been raped and
murdered in the Los Angeles Hillside areaand against the sensational and irresponsible
media coverage of the slayings."
I5
The performance was not presented in an art gallery, where it
would certainly have been ineffective, but on the steps of City Hall in Los Angeles, in the
presence of city officials, the public, and the media, at whom it was aimed. Here, then, is
performance that attains the ideal of "aesthetic communication," of artists confronting society in
a clear, relevant way.

In his essay "Life Is No Performance" Herbert Molderings states that "in traditional art, market
and exhibition mechanisms had separated the artist from the people; performance art aimed at
bringing them back together." Might we assume, then, that performance never truly replaced the
presence of poems and pictures on the page or museum wall, but reintroduced the presence of
the artist alongside them? In doing so, has performance also succeeded in expanding the
presence of the object and the word, broadened their scope, and our awareness of their
potential? We think so. How else but to view work such as, specifically, Bruce Nauman's
Performance Corridor (1969), Chris Burden's B-Car (1977) or The Big Wheel (1980), Vito Acconci's
Instant House (1980) or The Peoplemobile (1979); and work, in general, such as Scott Burton's
furniture; the machines of Alice Aycock and Dennis Oppenheim; installations by Jonathan
Borofsky, Ben D'Armagnac, Mike Parr, and the "tableaux vivants" of Luigi Ontani; the action
objects of Franz Erhard Walther and Joseph Beuys, and the "instruments" of Helmut Schober; the
photoworks of Lucas Samaras, Katherina Sieverding-Klaus Mettig, General Idea, Arnulf Rainer;
films by Rebecca Horn and Yvonne Rainer; the sound works of Terry Fox and Connie Beckley;
the sculpture of Richard Long and Klaus Rinke; video work by Marc Chaimowicz, Joan Jonas, and
Dan Graham; books by Gilbert and George and Ida Applebroog; even some of the essays in this
anthology. For example, whole sections of the interview with Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci's
(
notes, and parts of Les Levine's essay "Artistic" are in some way performable, or lend themselves
to performance. Here, in answer to David Shapiro in his essay "Poetry and Action: Performance
in a Dark Time" is writing to some degree reconciled with action.

And what of the "return" of figurative painting in recent years, by both artists once (or still)
involved with performance and those who never were? Does it owe any debt to the performance
art of the 1970s? According to Helena Kontova, "painting has been transformed by absorbing
elements of performance, installation art, and photography. Avant-garde art in the sixties and
seventies was characterized by the use of extra-artistic objects (including the human body),
accentuating their materiality and objectification,
and was also characterized as pure representation (which, in some cases, could be termed a
new form of show). Consequently, painting in general, and the paintings of ex-performers in
particular, tend to assume some of these characteristics."
16
We are reminded of Gina Pane's view
of performance aiding "the birth of a new painting," of Kounellis's "problems to establish a new
kind of painting," and of Stuart Brisley's reply, when asked what his main source of ideas for
performances was: "The sense of the figure in space, movement, the sense of oneself, the
human."
l7
This leads us back to Gregory Battcock's observation that "Before man was aware of art
he was aware of himself."

How, might we ask, did the presence of the artist come to be reintroduced? Brian O'Doherty
has written that "It was with Abstract Expressionism that critics first began consistently describing
artists as 'performers' and grading them according to 'performance.
'18
With the emphasis on
'gesture' and 'action' one began to get a double image of what was hailed as the single ultimate
image in art: the picture, and behind it, the artist, like some gesticulating ghostly presence.
19

Jack Burnham also recognized this situation when he wrote that "The erosion in the plastic arts
toward theater was in progress early in the beginning of this century, though never so evident as
when critics began to describe in detail the activities of Pollock and de Kooning in front of or
over a canvas." And, he concluded, "For a century the artist has chosen to be not only his best
subject matter, but in many cases his only legitimate subject."
20
Thus, the decline of the "single
ultimate image in art," combined with the artist as a "legitimate subject," laid the groundwork for
the reintroduction of the presence of the artist, a presence which is with us to this day.


In "An Interview with Laurie Anderson" conjures up an image of Barnett Newman "painting a
blue painting talking about the meaning of this blue paint. He's standing by his blue painting,
looking at it, and talking about it." And this, she believes, is "the generation ahead of what's called
live art, which is people really standing next to blue in real time saying, Blue Is ' "

Roland Barthes has spoken of "writing aloud"; might we speak, with the concept of the artist's
presence in mind, of "painting aloud" or "sculpting aloud" or "writing aloud" within the
framework of performance? The concept of "painting aloud" can best be seen in Yves Klein's
Anthropometries of the Blue Age
21
and in Jim Dine's The Smiling Workman,
22
both, as it happens, in
1960, Klein in Paris, and Dine in New York. "Sculpting aloud" is evidenced in Joseph Beuys's The
Chief (1964)
23
and in "living sculptures" such as Underneath the Arches (1969) by Gilbert and
George, of which two more dissimilar works might not possibly befound, but which are here
related. And of Barthes's "writing aloud" we find, for example, John Cage's performance Writing
Through Finnegan's Wake (1976), derived from Joyce's novel. Clearly, the presence of the artist has
expanded "the presence which poems and pictures silently proffered before," and our awareness
of their potential. But the presence of the artist did not appear, was not "reintroduced," as if by
magic or without reason.

Several contributors to this book offer theories about how this occurred. Herbert Molderings,
for example, suggests that "It is certainly not accidental that Happenings and action art, the
forerunners of the performance movement, started around 1960 when television began to play a
)
major role in everyday life." Claiming that "the origin of abstract painting around 1910 reflected
the disruption caused by the emergence of the movies," he concludes, "Similarly performance
art and video experiments are a response to an even deeper disruption caused by television
today." This would seem to correspond to Michel Benamou's pronouncement about television
(with performance art in mind): "Our society is dramatized by TV and at the same time deprived
of real drama."
24


Elsewhere in this book, Roselee Goldberg offers the idea that "whenever a certain school, be
it Cubism, Minimalism, or Conceptual art, seemed to have gained a stranglehold on art
production and criticism, artists turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and
indicating new directions."

Wayne Enstice in his essay "Performance Art's Coming of Age" cites formalist developments
within the art of the 1960s as significant factors in the emergence of performance art in the
1970s. "The vacuity of Minimalist sculpture," according to Enstice, "provoked the viewer to locate
the art experience." There were two results. "First, Minimalism changed the customary subject
object roles for the viewer of an artwork. Second, the anxiousness of Minimalism urged the viewer
to scrutinize the artist with unusual intensity in an attempt to historicize his intent and process."
Thus, "the unsettling blankness of Minimalism dislodged the artist more completely from behind
the craft of making art, to stress his executive presence." And he goes on to cite the "inevitable
dissolution" of the art object achieved by Conceptual art as enabling "the artist and his ambition
[to] become the cynosure of artistic energy."

"By taking up performance," wrote Walter Robinson, "an artist was refusing to join an elite art
profession that purveys esoteric luxury items to select clients." But, he continued, "For many of
the performers this attitude turned out to be a matter of professional strategy: with options in
painting and sculpture in the early '70's apparently closed off, performance served as a fast and
effective way of carving out a personal niche in the art system."
25


What all this seems to imply is that the reasons artists came to performanceand the social,
cultural, and political factors that set the stage, so to speak, for performance artare not easily
explained and detailed. They are to be found, perhaps, in each individual artist and, further, in
each performance. As such, performance art raised, and continues to raise, serious critical
questions about the nature of art, art's audience, the role of the artist, and even of the critics
themselves.

Michel Benamou claims that performance is found "in areas of culture which one seldom
associates with it criticism itself no longer content to gesticulate in the margins of texts also
takes hold of a part of the stage, and plays."
26
A recent example that tends to support this
viewpoint occurred during the symposium "Theoretical Analysis of the Intermedia Art Form,"
held at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1980. A large panel of notable
scholars and critics had been assembled, and a crowd filled the auditorium. They were, as befits
such an event, well behaved and dozing just a bit. Until critics such as David Antin, Gregory
Battcock, and, particularly, Abraham Moles set them in motion, and their laughter and animation
soon dispelled the sobriety of the proceedings. The critics' statements were received as
performances because, to the mind of the audience, they were indeed "performed."

Moles's "statement," with an uncooperative blackboard as his prop, resembled something far
closer to a scene from a Jacques Tati comedy than a lecture by a university professor. And
Battcock, who spoke about art in relation to the rapid transportation and communication systems
of our time, spoke so rapidly that his words became a nearly unintelligible blur, serving to
illustrate his point to great effect. The audience rather than listening passively to what was being
said actively experienced the ideas firsthand.

*+
Here, then, is criticism "no longer content to gesticulate in the margins of texts," and critics,
as performers, to some degree reconciled with performance. But the written criticism of
performance was problematic from the very beginning.

John Howell, the editor of Alive, a magazine devoted to performance and other forms of "live"
art, has written, "A performance has this obvious condition: when the show's over it's gone. The
remaining evidencearticles and reviews, photographs, notes, and scriptscan only suggest the
event. As a medium, then, performances are acutely exposed to, if not dependent on, critical
conceits (individual approaches, theoretical bias) which claim to render a missing object. For
certain performance artists who locate their dance, music, or theater in an art context the
critical vocabularies for dance, music, and theater are often too conservative for the scope of their
performances: at the same time an art vocabulary is insufficient for dealing with the attitudes and
techniques of those traditions.
27


In his essay "Performance Art: A New Form of Theatre, Not a New Concept in Art" Cee S.
Brown calls for "a new vocabulary" to deal with the work of performance artists. He notes that
"Much of the writing being done is merely descriptive and tends to use the vernacular of the
traditional art forms of painting and sculpture, shying away from the exploratory and critical."
Instead, he proposes a "species-specific language" that "could more closely approach criticism and
analysis rather than description."

With performance, traditional approaches to interpretation are of little or no use because the
value of the art is not to be found in its aesthetic characteristics but in the action of the artist:
what is said and what is done. The question of interpretation is opened up considerably in this
situation. Not only to be considered is the question of what is said and done but how? why?
where? and for how long? The elements of time and duration, for example, are present in
performance-the use of time, as well as the use of time as subject matter-more prominently than
in traditional forms ofart.
28
A painting or a sculpture may last thousands of years, with the proper
care, but a performance is of the moment, ephemeral to the point of self-obsolescence, it may last
only seconds or minutes.

Connie Beckley has written that "Music, unlike painting, is an art form in which the time of its
perception is controlled almost entirely by the artist, and in which the audience is subject to the
artist's judgment concerning the use of that time."
29
If we were to replace the word music with the
word performance, the same would be true. Consider a performance by Stuart Brisley such as 180
Hours (1978), which spanned that time period. Or one by Helmut Schober, The Devotion Piece
(1978), which may last only two and a half minutes. Or Abramovi!/Ulays Gold Found by the Artists
(1981), which was performed for seven hours each day, for sixteen consecutive days. And what of
Teh-ching Hsieh's "one year performance: 26 Sept. '81-26 Sept. '82," during which time the artist
lived on the streets of New York, in all weather, without once entering a building for shelter? How
can performances such as these be interpreted by the same methods as those used for static art?
Obviously, they cannot.

The role of criticism must expand and change along with that of art and of the artist. Art
forms such as performance encourage critical experimentation and offer responsible critics an
opportunity to assess the very foundation of art criticism.

Gregory Battcock wrote the following in 1979:

[Performance] art is, perhaps, the first art phenomenon to clearly demonstrate that
modern art has become antiquated. Modern art is based upon a single assumption. That
the artwork is only what it is.It is not a picture or a metaphor for something else. It is, say,
a photograph, first and only. Or, perhaps, it is a painting, first and only. This assumption
**
still looms above us all. We automatically accept it. We fall back upon it whenever we have
a problem in criticizing, accepting, or understanding a work of art.

Equally, we use this assumption to help us "get out of' numerous situations. A work of
art that may be quite useless, quite impossible to understand, perhaps, quite meaningless
in every way, can be justified if it manages to refer specifically and exclusively to its own
self. The phrase that explains this attitude, in French, is "l'Art, pour l'Art." It is the
cornerstone of modernism. It is the major theoretical basis for all modern art, be it
painting, video, architecture, or environmental. However, it no longer works.

The shifts in art that will be lasting and that will help determine the art of the future
will be those that recognize the limitations, if not the absurdity of this assumption. A
medium may, in fact, be interesting and useful and challenging when it tries to be
something that it is not.

This attitude, expressed above, is difficult for some people to understand, they have
been so thoroughly trained to accept the idea that art is what it is, as the only code for
making, evaluating, and understanding contemporary art. Yet the very profound level of
artistic energy that is currently expended in the performance field indicates that the
major basis for modernist art is crumbling. We are indeed upon the threshold of a new
art, and it is about time. The art that has been presented as new, it is becoming painfully
clear, usually isn't new at all. For it continually relies upon the basic assumption that made
all modern art possible in the first place, and such art is, of course, no longer new or
modern. A truly new modern art will emerge when the basic theoretical foundation for
the new (old) art of our time gives way.
30


Would he, were he able, express these same sentiments today? Some might think so, some
might not. Our reason for including them here, at this time, lies simply with the fact that they
were relevant then and they are relevant now. Perhaps even more so. In any case, they deserve a
wider audience than they had when they first appeared in print more than three years ago. For
these reasons we find it appropriate to include them here.

The performance festivals and symposia of the late 1970s did not (nor, perhaps, did they set
out to) achieve what, traditionally, "retrospectives for art movements" are supposed to do: wrap
up a group of artists and their work into one neat, tidy package. This "package" may be opened at
a later date, its contents removed and displayed, thus facilitating art-historical preservation and
instruction. It was not to prove so easy with performance art. Because these events often
presented work by a number of artists-with different backgrounds, from all over the world
virtually in one place, at one time, the similarities as well as the differences between them were
visibly apparent to all: to the spectators, to the critics, and to the artists (who knew all along).
Moreover, the critics, on whom the task of categorization fell, were not, as a rule, in agreement
on how to classify and define the form. In fact, the contributors to this anthology are not always in
agreement either. This is not to say that a deliberately haphazard book has been planned. Rather,
the essays we have collected here, though at times contradictory, offer a wide variety of ideas and
information without making claims for a final explanation.

The book has been organized into four parts, "Historical Introduction," "Theory and
Criticism," "The Artists," and "A Gallery of Performances." Several of the essays in the first part
deal with art and artists not strictly part of the performance art of the 1970s, the time of the
origin and development of the form. Their inclusion is meant to provide a background, as it
were, to the aes thetic and to the intentions unique to performance artists in the 1970s. It is
hoped that they may serve to identify or reveal the antecedents and differences between the art of
the past and the art of our time.

*"
Gregory Battcock's association with E.P. Dutton began in 1964 when he proposed that
Lionello Venturi's History of Art Criticism, which had been out of print for nearly twenty years, be
made available once again. That he was instrumental in saving, for a time, a book he called
"probably the first such work" of its kind, and one that remains "the boldest," is surely one of the
greater achievements of his career.

The Art of Performance is the end of a long, successful line for Dutton that began with Gregory
Battcock's first anthology, The New Art (1966). He selected essays for it by John Cage, Marcel
Duchamp, Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, and others that illustrated "the intimate relationship
between contemporary art and
contemporary criticism." In the anthologies that followed, The New American Cinema (1967),
Minimal Art (1968), Idea Art, New Ideas in Art Education (both 1973), and Super Realism (1975), he
repeatedly emphasized the interaction of the artist and the critic and called for "a new aesthetic"
to deal with the art of our times. Anthologies that summed up the goals and techniques of
important movements such as Minimal art and Conceptual art were all timely, providing
informative, often provocative material when it was needed most. As his friend and colleague
Pierre Restany remarked, "He was in the forefront."

In 1977 he brought together some of his own critical essays in a book called Why Art: Casual
Notes on the Aesthetics of the Immediate Past. Two more anthologies followed, New Artists Video in
1978, and Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Critical Anthology of the New Music, published posthumously
in 1981. I At the time of his death in December 1980, Dr. Battcock was at work on an anthology
about performance art, for which I had done research as his assistant. Being familiar with the
manuscript and with his ideas for the book, I proposed its completion to his longtime editor at
Dutton, Cyril Nelson. We both agreed that the book should be published as he had planned.
ROBERT NICKAS

1
An Unpublished Text: Prospectus of His Work, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p.5
2
Terry Fox (interview with Robin White), View 2, no. 3 (June 1979), p. 9.
3
Signals 1, no. 8 (June-July 1965); reprinted in the catalogue When Attitudes Become Form (Bern:
Kunsthalle, 1969), unpaged.
4
LArt Corporel, in the catalogue The Art of Performance (Venice: Palazzo Grassi, 1979),
unpaged.
5
Presence and Play, in Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamou and Charles
Caramello (Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1977), p. 3.
6
Stuart Brisley: Excerpt from an Interview (with Sarah Kent), Flash Art, nos. 80-81
(February-April 1978), p. 57.
7
Notes on Performing a Space, Avalanche, no. 6 (Fall 1972), p.4.
8
Wound as a sign, Flash Art, nos. 92-93 (October-November 1979), p. 37.
9
Structure and Sensibility: An Interview with Jannis Kounellis (with Willoughby Sharp),
Avalanche, no. 5 (Summer 1972), p. 21.
10
Jannis Jounellis (interview with Robin White), View 1, no. 10 (March 1979), p. 17.
11
In a written statement to the editor, December 2, 1981.
12
The Angry Month of March, The Village Voice, March 25, 1981, p. 91.
13
N. Gourfinkel, Le Thtre russe contemporain (Paris, 1931); reprinted in the catalogue Poetry
Must Be Made by All! Transform the World (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1969), pp. 44-45.
14
See Guerilla Art Action Group: A Selection 1969-1976 (New York: Printed Matter Inc., 1978).
15
Moira Roth, Toward a History of California Performance, Part Two, Arts 52, no. 10 (June
1978), pp.118-119.
16
Helena Kontova, From Performance to Painting, Flash Art, no. 106 (February-March
1982) p. 17.
17
Stuart Brisley, p. 58.
*#
18
From this one should not conclude that Abstract Expressionist painting was a form of
performance art.
19
looking at the Artist as Performer, in Object and Idea: An Art Critics Journal 1961-1967 (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1967) p. 227. (Originally written in August 1964).
20
Objects and Ritual: Towards a Working Ontology of Art, Arts 47, no. 3 (December-January
1973), p. 30.
21
A performance in which paintings were made by nude models who, under the direction of
the artist, applied paint to their bodies and pressed them against immense sheets of paper. Klein,
it should be noted, did not himself paint these works, but employed the models as living
brushes. See Pierre Restany, Yves Klein (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982).
22
Dine has written of this first Happening: I had a flat built. It was a three-panel flat There
was atable with three jars of paint and two brushes on it, and the canvas was painted white. I came
around it with one light on me. I was all in red, with a big, black mouth, all my face and head
were red, and I had a red smock on, down to the floorI picked up one of the jars and drank the
paint and then I pored the other twoover my head, quickly, and dove, physically, through the
canvas. The light went off. A Statement, in Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: Dutton
Paperbacks, 1965), p. 1985.
23
An Action for which Beuys, wrapped in a large roll of felt with a dead hare at each end, lay
for eight hours on the floor of the Ren Block Gallery in Berlin. One of the spectators, the artist
Wolf Vostell, wondered at the conclusion: Beuys as sculpture? The whole environment as
sculpture? To let oneself become an event? He concluded by describing the evening as
philosophical theater.
24
Presence and Play, p.3.
25
Art + Life = Artists Performances, Art in America (January 1981), p. 15.
26
Presence and Play, p.3.
27
Performance, Art in America 63, no. 3 (May-June 1975), p. 18.
28
An exception would be, as an example, Jean Tinguelys Hommage New York (1960). When
on March 17, 1960 [Tinguelys] machine was put into action, the spectacle was one of beautiful
humor, poetry, and confusion. Jeans machine performed for ahlf an hour and exists no more
[having destroyed itself as planned], Billy Kluver, The Garden Party, in the catalogue The
Machine (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968) p. 169.

29
Connie Beckley, Data, no. 24 (December-January 1976-77) p. 41.

30
LArt Corporel.
*$

Part 1: Historical Introduction

ATTANASIO Dl FELICE

Renaissance Performance: Notes on Prototypical Artistic Actions in the Age of the Platonic
Princes

"performance art finds its most significant prototypes in the Italian Renaissance. In other
words, performance has been a key artistic activity from the very beginnings of our modern concept of
the artistic role..." So begins the following essay by Attanasio di Felice who, although he acknowledges
an understandable lack of documentation of Renaissance performance, ably describes spectacles,
processions, pageants, and displays of fireworks by artists such as Alberti, Leonardo, and Bernini. He
claims that these three "great seminal figures of the early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and
Baroque, respectively, stand out prominently as artists whose work in performance has had
repercussions into our own day."

Among some of the performances described are Buontalenti's "mock naval battle in the flooded
courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti" (1589), Bernini's L'Inondazione (1638, Inundation of the Tiber),
"in which the flood scene caused a substantially built house to collapse," and Leonardo's Paradiso
(1490) with "performers costumed as planets revolv[ing] and... proclaiming the return of the
Golden Age."

Attanasio di Felice has written about modern art and performance for Flash Art and Portfolio.
He lives and works in New York and Rome and is director of the Serra di Felice Gallery in New York.

The guests now streamed into the Sala del giuoco alla pala, which had been arranged for the
representation of the Paradiso, by Leonardo da Vinci, the Court mechanician. Then a
train of powder exploded, and crystalline globes, like planets, were seen disposed in a
circle, filled with water, and illumined by a myriad of living fires sparkling with rainbow
colours.
DMITRI MEREZHKOVSKII, after the eyewitness account of Bernardo Bellincioni

That area of interdisciplinary artistic concerns known as performance art finds its most
significant prototypes in the Italian Renaissance. In other words, performance has been a key
artistic activity from the very beginnings of our modern concept of the artistic role,
correspondent with the emergence of what remains our guiding principle of individualism in
society.

The relationship of Renaissance performance to developments in all the plastic arts, in
architecture, and in philosophy was not merely casual but causal, performance serving frequently
as the highly flexible testing ground for ideas then finding their way into painting and
architecture.

The most influential philosophical ideas for the Quattrocento were those Neoplatonic ideals
that found their way through allegory into poetry and painting, and that interested even several
powerful noble patrons.

As early as 1438 there was a debate at Ferrara between Platonists and Aristotelians, the Roman
Catholic Church being a proponent of Aristotle. The arrival in Italy of many Greek scholars after
the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was of major importance in providing the
opportunity for a greater diffusion of Platonic thought. Those who embraced it were called
"humanists" and were even encouraged by the papacy for a few years in the person of Pope
*%
Nicholas V (1447-1455); under the Medici the Platonic Academy was established at Florence with
the guidance of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.

Thus Neoplatonic philosophy played a part in determining the nature of many courtly
commissions, and indeed colored the patron's concept of the artist's role. Aside from the
specifically Neoplatonic content to be found in much of the earliest performance art, the idea
that the Earth itself is but an imperfect representation of the perfect forms to be found only in
the empyrean lent to Neoplatonically inspired rituals the weight of being considered parallel
realities, that is, creations at least as "real" as the world around them. Thus, as the officially
acknowledged erectors of parallel realities, most readily manifested in performance art, artists
came to be regarded as creators rather than mere artisans.

A most extraordinary example was Sigismondo Malatesta, the Prince of Rimini, so
passionately committed to Platonic ideals that he fought bloody battles with the Turks in the
Peloponnesus for the
sole purpose of recovering the ashes of the philosopher Gemistus Pletho. Malatesta
commissioned Alberti to build the Tempio Malatestiano, chronologically the first example of
what is considered
Quattrocento architecture. The sarcophagi set in niches in the outer walls of this Platonic
temple contain the remains of humanists whom Sigismondo had attracted to his court, or with
whom he had engaged in particularly meaningful discourse, including Gemistus. In his book The
Stones of Rimini Adrian Stokes commented: "There have been investigators who thought they
found more than one hint of esoteric rite and symbolic manipulation staged in the Tempio." As
opposed to the Medici, who tended to use artists as
political tools, while paying elaborate lip service to Platonism (which is already something),
Sigismondo gave artists such as Piero della Francesca free rein to be creative entities.

In Quattrocento Italy, once the liberating factor of a philosophic framework was established,
artists manifested work in every form possible to the technology of the day. From the design and
execution of fountains to the production of spectacles for the courts, the artists of the
Renaissance were encouraged in the pursuit of their pronounced multimedia concerns. Their
normal activities included the creation of trionfi (triumphal processions frequently requiring the
construction of elaborate temporary arches), cortei (court pageants), grottescherie (masquerades
with bizarrely costumed participants), and carri allegorici (allegorical vehicles often used in jousts).
A long line of such artists extending through the Baroque era included Filarete (c. 1400-1469),
Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo, Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554), Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536),
Giulio Parigi (d. 1635), Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Stefano della Bella (1610-1664), Andrea Pozzo
(1642-1709), Giovanni Servandoni (1695-1766), and Antonio Galli Bibiena (1700-1774).

Donato Bramante (1444-1514) was called upon by the Duke of Milan in 1492 to create "una
fantasia per mettere a spettacolo." Raphael painted the sets for Ariosto's Lena. In 1535 Polidoro
da Caravaggio designed a triumphal procession for Emperor Charles V at Messina. In 1589
Bernardo Buontalenti (1536-1608) planned elaborate festivities for the marriage of Christine de
Lorraine and Ferdinando de Medici in Florence, including a mock naval battle in the flooded
courtyard of the Pitti Palace.

The greatest historians have lamented the dearth of documentationof Renaissance artists'
performance. Sir Kenneth Clark wrote, "In studying the architecture and even the painting of the
Renaissance, we must always remember that one whole branch of each is almost completely lost
to usthe architecture and decoration which was designed for pageants and masquerades." This
ephemerality was not lost on Renaissance man either. Some attempts were made to create a
record of these works, particularly
triumphal processions honoring the mighty, in the form of commemorative books especially
prepared for the occasion, which reproduced the principal motifs devised by the artists. These
*&
souvenir booklets, which themselves have largely been lost, in a way parallel the revival of artists'
books that coincided with the renewed performance activity early in this century.

Yet, despite the lack of direct evidence and the disappointment of not being able to
appreciate the no doubt wonderful works so conveniently achieved through these temporary
media, there are several interesting trains of thought that may be deduced from the records that
do exist.

Three of the great seminal figures of the early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque,
respectively, Alberti, Leonardo, and Bernini stand out prominently as artists whose work in
performance has had repercussions into our own day. Although each achieved his greatest fame
in a different discipline, namely architecture, painting, and sculpture, each engaged in all three
of these activities and more.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), through the progress of his development, makes clear to us
the intrinsic connections between painting perspective, stage design, and architecture. Largely
remembered today for his rediscovery of Vitruvius and the innovative application of ancient
architectural precepts in such structures as the Malatesta Temple (1450), Alberti was for many
years before his first architectural projects engaged in painting as a form of personal research and
in optical experiments. During his formative years he was already a famed and sought-after
personage, well known for his humorous dinner speeches, the texts of which, as well as a funeral
oration for his dog, survive today.

Alberti came to realize that ancient Greek knowledge of perspective, inferred from references
by Vitruvius to lost treatises, derived from scenographic design techniques developed within the
context of performance practice. Alberti authored the first Renaissance treatise on painting and
systematic perspective in 1435, expressing the Platonic view that the plastic arts represent a sort of
frozen music or an artificial fixing of the universal flux, in respect to which, performance,
providing temporarily evident intervals, may be regarded as a nexus between the fluid and the
fixed. It is no wonder then that his comedic play Philodoxus is the first conceived as a carefully
controlled aesthetic whole, Alberti having designed every element, including the pioneering use
of illusionistic perspective, the seed of that tendency toward theatricalization in all the arts which
culminated in the Baroque.

Questions of illusion and reality, provoked by Platonic perceptions and instigating the
scientific speculations of Alberti and Leonardo, find a curious parallel early in this century when
the major reemphasis of artists' performance by the Futurists was added to by their professed
interest in the philosophical ramifications of physics, notably in Bergson and Einstein, and a
renewed appreciation of those same Pythagorean precepts, such as the "golden section," which
fascinated artists during the Renaissance.

Our "shadowy" apprehension of reality in terms of flux, so graphically parabled by Plato in his
Republic, has made its greatest impact through Einstein's theories, which demonstrate that energy
and mass are interchangeable in the inseparable continuum of space and time. Quantum physics
actually refers to subatomic partides, the shadowy stuff of which the universe is made, as
tendencies to exist. These findings, affirmed by Heisenbergs principle of indeterminacy,
indicating how the nature that we seek merely to observe cannot help but be altered by mans
presence, confirm Renaissance mans largely intuitive recognition of his own personal sense of
spatialty, thus making it possible for Leonardo and Bramante to conceive of an art of
performance and for us to recognize it as such today.

The hallmarks of the Renaissance mansyncretic breadth of vision, multiplicyt of talents, an
exalted sense of personal creative forcewere present to such an extraordinary degree in
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) that he was regarded with awe even by the great men of his time.
*'
As a formulator of highly impressive pageants and smaller scale spectacles full of novelty and
surprise, he was a legend in his own day, provoking unique commentary by contemporary diarists
and historians.

With something of the mischievous spirit of the trickster he liked to mystify and frighten
observers, as in the following account by the patinter Giorgio Vasari:

He formed a paste of a certain kind of wax, and as he walked he shaped animals very
thin and full of wind, and by blowing into them, made them fly through the air, but when
the wind ceased they fell to the ground. On the back of a most bizarre lizard, found by the
vinedresser of the Belvedere, he fixed, with a mixture of quicksilver, wings composed of
scales stripped from other lizards, which, as it walked, quivered with the motion; and
having given it eyes, horns, and beard, taming it, and keeping it in a box, he made all his
friends to whom he showed it, fly for fear. He used often to have the guts of a ram
completely freed of their fat and cleaned, and thus made so fine that they could have
been held in the palm of the hand; and having placed a pair of blacksmiths bellows in
another room, he fixed to them one of these, and, blowing into them, filled the room,
which was very large, so that whoever was in it was obliged to retret into a corner; showing
how, transparent and full of wind, from taking up little space at the beginning they come
to occupy much, and likening them to virtue. He made an infinite number of such follies,
and gave his attention to mirrors.

It was through such "follies" that Leonardo undoubtedly perfected the techniques that
permitted the range of fantastic effects he was able to achieve in his elaborate commissioned
pageants, notably during the period at Milan where he was originally received as a musician.
There, under the Sforza, he created his Paradiso in 1490 and Jupiter and Danae in 1496.
Mythological themes, like the stories of Jupiter and his loves, were most commonly used as the
basis for the design of court pageants and festive allegorical cars. But as the Platonists knew, as
Vico attempted to ascertain by semantic proofs, and as Frazer, Freud, Jung, Eliade, and Deleuze
have affirmed, these colorful episodes, so adaptable to the plastic
arts and theatre, are of archetypical significance.

This is not to say that conventions of mythological expression were not used by Leonardo and
others to convey their own personal interpretations, just as the pageants themselves had as
pretexts the ceremonial festivities of princely marriages and the like. As Walter Pater noted, "We
have seen Leonardo using incidents of sacred story, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects for
pictorial realization, but as a symbolical language for fancies all his own."

The reinterpretation of symbolic devices so conveniently realized through temporary media
makes of performance art a laboratory of metamorphoses of linguistic significations. Renaissance
performance would undoubtedly be a fertile field for the observation of such linguistic
Darwinism if we only had more concrete evidence to analyze.

We are fortunate in the case of Leonardo's pageant of Paradiso, which was witnessed and
described by the court poet Bernardo Bellincioni. Leonardo caused performers costumed as
planets to revolve and recite verses proclaiming the return of the Golden Age. This specific
performance has continued to exert its influence in the twentieth century. It is fascinating that
Ferruccio Busoni based one act of his mysterious masterpiece, the opera Doktor Faust, on the
Paradiso. He was particularly affected by Leonardo's use of crystalline globes of water to produce
the Pythagorean "music of the spheres." Meditating on the chiaroscuro of Leonardo's character,
his double nature turning at once toward Christ and Antichrist, Busoni composed a musical
equivalent to his combination of "clear shadow and obscure light."

*(
It is impressive to what extent the mere legend of Renaissance performance persists in its
power to inspire artists through the philosophical tradition it evokes and in outward aspects of
symbolic representation. Most notable in this regard have been the painter Filippo de Pisis (1896-
1956) who appeared in the guise of a humanist; and at the present time Luigi Ontani who, in his
tableaux vivants, has represented the demigods of antiquity as well as the now hardly less mythical
figures of Leonardo and Raphael. Moreover, in their concrete mythopoetic actions, Leonardo
and the others are in a larger sense the noble fathers of all successive performance artists.

Among the few additional details that may be added about Leonardo's public spectacles there
is little of revelatory significance, just a strengthening of what we already know. In an unusually
diarylike note to be found at Windsor Castle, dated April 23, 1491, during the period at Milan,
Leonardo mentions that he had
been at the house of Galeazzo da Sanseverino to organize a spectacle for a joust in which the
servants were to be costumed as wild men. A series of finely wrought drawings exists for
masquerade costumes (c. 1512), containing also some such details of effect as a miniature
waterfall, but for what event or where cannot be determined. Vasari describes the mechanical
lion made during his final years in France, his last documented commission of any kind. The lion
advanced a few steps and appeared to menace King Francis I, then its head opened revealing
lilies in the form of the royal crest.

Leonardo created other automata, the traditions for which go back to the Middle Ages and to
the ancient Greeks. For this we have Athanasius Kircher (Musurgia Universalis, 1650) and other
authorities. Leonardo designed and built ingenious mechanical drums and other instruments of
great refinement. In fact, music and sound made up an important part of his artistic concerns.
Many of his short compositions survive. By all accounts he was a highly accomplished musician
and renowned improviser on the lyre; so
much so that when he was first received at the Milanese court it was as the player of a curious
silver lyre of his own making, in the form of a horse's head.

Among his inventions are a sort of wind instrument whose function is based on his study of
human anatomy. In what many have seen fit to regard as purely scientific researches, Leonardo
conducted experiments that lent to his understanding not only of the mechanics of light and
sound waves but also of the human senses, the relationships among them, and the phenomena
that stimulate them. We know from his notebooks that he observed correspondences between
the visual and auditory realms, the physical evidence of certain Platonic ideas. Even such
seemingly trivial discoveries as that of the small heaps of dust that formed on a table struck with a
hammer must have been of special significance for a mind such as Leonardo's.

He was not only an incredibly acute observer of natural phenomena but also a keen observer
of the effects of such phenomena on the human senses, and thereby on the emotions. He wrote,
"Observe how much grace and sweetness are to be seen in the faces of men and women on the
streets, with the approach of evening in bad weather." (He thus anticipated what would be
discerned centuries later concerning changes in atmospheric ozone levels and their effect on
mood.)

In what has come down to us as the Treatise on Painting, Leonardo urges the study of gesture
to determine those movements that best convey certain emotions: "That figure is most
praiseworthy
which, by its action, best expresses the passions of the soul."

He applied his scientific and engineering knowledge to performance and he applied it, if I
may beg the question for a moment, with a subtle understanding of the human heart, to move his
audience as he would.

*)
Much confusion has existed among admirers of Leonardo who for the past few centuries have
had difficulty resolving what divides in their minds Leonardo the artist from Leonardo the
scientist or simply nonartist. This division of roles has been particularly acute since the
rationalism of Descartes became popular enough for people to begin thinking of knowledge and
imagination as hindrances to each other. This conflict is essentially contained within the
arguments of Descartes and his opponent Vico.

An involvement with science and engineering goes hand in hand with the emergence of the
role of artist-as-individual. Was not Giotto an architect; and certainly the creators of systematic
perspective were mathematicians? In a Cartesian world the painter became, as the nineteenth-
century French saying went, "dumb as a painter." According to Vico man could achieve a surer
knowledge of himself through his own creations (history, languages, laws) than through the study
of natural science. Poets and artists through their ongoing reinterpretation of mythic knowledge
provide the basis for a possible superior understanding of man.

Leonardo seems to have maintained a tenuous balance for himself between these two
extreme attitudes. Although nominally opposed to the Medicean Platonic academy and its
worship of the past, this was at least in part due to differences in personalities. Leonardo later
taught himself Latin grammar, and he was certainly concerned with the idea of flux (Gemistus
stemmed all from Neptune), a sense of fluidity in the universe that contributed to his inability to
"finish" anything. He was led in his final years to make many intense line-drawing studies of the
motion of water, not the placid surfaces of lakes or the gentle flow of rivers but the utterly
cataclysmic force of the deluge, a force beyond the capabilities of man's control until today. A few
years earlier he produced more modest studies of flowing water encountering obstructions that
seem purposely placed.

Artists have always been known for their impressive actions: Alberti leaping, in a single bound,
over a man's head, Leonardo bending horseshoes easily in his hands. This need for and
admiration of unusual and difficult feats found its fullest gratification in the frightful fires,
powerful explosions, and actual floods of the spectacles of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680).

Bernini is the earliest major artist about whose performance activities we have a substantial
amount of documentation. As such he is a key not only to the age which he did more than any
other to define, the Baroque, but also, inasmuch as he carried forward concepts from the past, he
adds in retrospect to our understanding of the Renaissance.

His career is marked from the start by a concern with ritual and spectacle. This is due in part,
of course, to his lifelong attachment to the papacy with its increasingly elaborate rites and holy
festivals, far from the simple purity of Gregorian chant. But it is also clearly essential to his
personal development as an artist, and to the tenor of the age that he helped form. As the
honored Bernini scholar Fagiolo dell'Arco wrote,

He transformed immobility and certainty into movement and ambiguity. And this
movement was not merely psychological and representational; it was actual movement.
The statue had ceased to be the ideal: now it was the fountain, the theatrical set, the
ephemeral construction.

From all the evidence available, it is clear that Bernini's spectacles stimulated the imagination
to contemplate the profound questions of the cosmosspace and timethat occupied the
Platonically
spirited artists of the Renaissance. However, his indisputable individuality as well as his
philosophical concerns were assimilated within the bounds of the hybrid doxy of an at once
stricter and more extravagant Counter-Reformation Catholicism. In his day artists were called on
"+
to create sacred performances transforming entire church interiors for such ceremonies as the
marathon "Forty Hours of the Sacrament."

Renaissance performance art took most of its forms from the highly ritualized society of the
Middle Ages when church processions and feudal formalities such as jousts were anonymously
planned. Individualism was responsible for contaminating these forms with personal
interpretations and for awakening a lust for
fame that naturally led the men of an age obsessed with antiquity to those ancient metaphors
for personal greatness, the triumph and its counterpart the triumphal arch. It is no coincidence
that the first two explicitly Quattrocento structures are the triumphal arch of King Alfonso I of
Naples and Alberti's Tempio Malatestiano, which incorporates the triumphal arch into the center
of the facade.

Bernini had both the inclination and the means vastly to expand the expressive scope of these
forms from the past while satisfying with unprecedented grandiosity the love of virtuosic effect,
achieved by emphasizing the basic elements of water, fire, and light.

The age of the Baroque saw the ultimate theatricalization of the plastic arts embodied in the
works, sculptural and architectural, of Bernini. Bernini's basic preoccupation with theatrical
effect is clearly represented by his many staged spectacles, for which he wrote the scripts,
designed the scenes and costumes, carved the sculptures, planned effects of lighting and sound,
and undertook the complete direction and execution of the works himself, including elaborate
feats of engineering. The most brilliant example was probably his L'lnondazione (Inundation of
the Tiber) of 1638 in which the flood scene featured real rushing waters that alarmed the
audience, and caused a substantially built house to collapse.

The cupola of Saint Peter's in Rome remains partially melted as the result of Bernini's
Allestimento di una Girandola (fireworks installation) of 1659. It has been suggested that he found
inspiration not only from nature but also from the artistic camp, particularly from Peruzzi who
some years before was fond of flooding the dining halls of villas, arranging for guests to eat in
small boats. Drawing parallels between the Baroque phenomenon of spectacle informing plastic
arts, we may quote Dorfles when he speaks of "qu'une des situations les plus curieuses de notre
poquedam le secteur des arts plastiques(et non seulement des arts plastiques, mais aussi de
la musique), est une tendence univoque vers la spectacularit, vers la thtricalisation" ("that one
of the most curious situations of our agein the sector of the plastic arts [and not only of the
plastic arts, but also of music], is an unequivocal tendency toward the spectacular, toward
theatricalization").

Leonardo said: "Il dipintore disputa e gareggia colla natura" (The painter contends with and
rivals nature). And in the realm of performance the artists of the Rinascimento created works that
frequently combined a matrixing of Neoplatonic symbolism (seeking to reflect the perfect forms
of the empyrean) with a love of display and effect for its own sake. However, the inevitable
changes in social structure, involving the loss of interest in Neoplatonism on the part of princely
and noble patrons, altered the combination of factors that had facilitated the creation of
performances by artists who "contend with and rival nature" (as opposed to those who merely
seek to reproduce it). There were also instances of the repression of Neoplatonism as when
Botticelli's work was burned by Savonarola and when Malatesta was ordered to be burned in effigy
in St. Peter's Square (on being informed of this, Malatesta commissioned from Giulio Romano an
effigy suitable for that purpose). In other words, artists were being persuaded once more to
descend from the heroic heights of true creators (that is to say "poets," from poietes, the maker),
being able to conduct rituals in which they, as signifiers, imparted original autonomous
knowledge to those who were present, to increasingly pursuing the recording of mundane visual
experience.

"*
The growing tendency toward specialization, which was becoming a factor in the 1500s of
portrait painting, church decoration, mosaic work, sculpture, costume design, and architecture
becoming mutually exclusive professions, reached an extreme that firmly established itself by the
1700s. By then there was nowhere to be found a painter or sculptor who was active in
performance, but there had fully emerged the set designer, the costume designer, and so forth,
who were considered artisans as such. Heavily contributing to these changes in artistic concerns
was the steady secularization of philosophy, the attendant lessening of the significance of court
ritual and pageantry, and the growth of public forms of theatre.

Just as the withering of interest in court ritual (having lost its meaning in the ongoing social
revolution) showed a proportionate decrease in performance art, so it follows that a key element
in the notating of artists' performance must reside in an understanding of the significance of
ritual in society. As a pioneering delineator of the concept of the class struggle, Vico traced the
processes whereby social change affected the uses of language (in its total sense of
communication) and imbued certain people (called by him "heroes" after the original
prototypes), who constantly reappear in history, with the power to determine and demonstrate
the meaning of certain words and actions.

Examining the historic origins of performance art helps clarify the relationship of
performance to painting and other forms today. The speculations of present-day Vasaris have in
the early history of performance art been an invaluable aid to gaining the perspective necessary
to discourse correctly on phenomena that are all too recent to allow easy analysis.

Renaissance and Baroque performance art provide an example that contradicts the popular
current view of performance as a symptom of a tendency toward dematerialization or even
Minimalism in the arts. Rather, history points toward a distinct pattern of performance mediating
between nature (the flux) and the plastic arts (the fixed) in a process at once of dissolution and
materialization; in other words, the form in which the artist discovers for himself the truths of
cycles and intervals (Rilke: "music, the breathing of statues"), of time, which he manifests more
permanently in more enduring form. Bernini spoke eloquently of his allegorical figure of Time:

The figure of Time carrying and revealing Truth is not finished. My idea is to show
him carrying her through the air, and at the same time show the effects of Time wasting
and consuming everything in the end. In the model I have set columns, obelisks, and
mausoleums, and these things, which are shown overwhelmed and destroyed by Time, are
the very things that support Time in the air, without which he could not fly even if he had
wings.
""

ROSELEE GOLDBERG

Performance: A Hidden History

According to RoseLee Goldberg, performance art has been around for quite some time. She notes
that the history of performance art in this century can be seen as a series of waves, and she points
out that the Futurists, the constructivists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists all attempted to resolve
problematic issues in performance.

RoseLee Goldberg is author of Performance: Live Art from 1909 to the Present (1979) and has
been actively involved in performance art in the United States and England. She concludes this essay
with the suggestion that art history demonstrates that artists have used performance as a way of
animating the many formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based.

From Futurism to the present the history of performance raises fascinating questions about
the nature of art as much as about art history as it is written. Not a continuous history, rather it
tends to stop and start, to emerge during particular political and social climates. At times it
appears as an outrageous publicity stunt for artists wishing to engage a wider public; at others it
reinforces an analysis of the formal art notions of a period. Its variety and ephemerality pose
difficulties of definition, as much as of recognition, in conventional art-history studies.

Art historians have no ready category in which to place performance, and with good reason.
For performance has always developed along the edges of disciplines such as literature, poetry,
film, theatre, music, architecture, or painting. It has involved video, dance, slides, and narrative
and has been performed by single individuals or by groups, in streets, bars, theatres, galleries, or
museums. As a permissive open-ended medium, with endless variables, it has always been
attractive to artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms.

Indeed, because the very nature of the form is about the crossbreeding of the arts,
performance aggressively defies precise or easy definition. If this genre possesses any underlying
common denominator, it is that performance is "live art" created by artists who closely relate their
public confrontations to the fine-art modes of the time. The decision to perform live before an
audience rather than to work in an isolated studio and to exhibit in a gallery removed from any
direct relationship with the public-is an important factor in coming to grips with the
phenomenon of performance. Conversely, public interest in the medium stems from an apparent
desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its
community. Like tribal ritual, it provides a presence for the artist in society while its references
remain tightly knitted into the art context.

This audience-performer relationship provides yet another characteristic of performance,
which is that it can be both serious and entertaining: the motive to make art ideas available to a
larger public inevitably suggests a level of playfulness or satire, which is used in some cases to
demystify observers of their deeply held notions of the preciousness of art.

Performance is the expression of artists who wish to challenge the viewers' perceptions of art
and the limits of those perceptions. Each performer makes his or her own definition of
performance in the very manner and process of execution, so that each work becomes an entirely
unexpected combination of events. The form allows artists to make a "collage of media," and the
means by which they do this are as diverse as the imaginations of the performance artists
themselves. Moreover, the expertise, even the virtuosity, of performance artists often lies in their
ability to manipulate the unlimited choice of material, much in the same way that an editor
pieces together the hundreds of thousands of frames of a movie.

"#
Such a radical stance against the conventions of art has made performance a catalyst in the
history of twentieth-century art. Whenever a certain school, be it Cubism, Minimalism, or
Conceptual art, seemed to have gained a stranglehold on art production and criticism, artists
turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions.

The history of performance art in this century can thus be seen as a series of waves; successive
periods when performance provided a release from the stagnation and complacency of set styles
and attitudes. Moreover, within the history of the avant-gardemeaning those artists who led the
field in breaking with each successive traditionperformance in the twentieth century has been
at the forefront of such activity: an avant-avant-garde. Despite the fact that most of what is written
today about the work of the Futurists, Constructivists, Dadaists, or Surrealists continues to
concentrate on the art objects produced by each period, it was more often than not the case that
these movements found their roots and attempted to resolve problematic issues in performance:
when the members of such groups were still in their twenties or early thirties, it was in
performance that they tested their ideas, only later expressing them in objects. The Italian
Futurists, for example, began with manifestoes and performance before actually finding a
painterly or sculptural means to represent those ideas. The Zurich Dadaists were poets, cabaret
artists, and performers before creating Dada objects, if at all. Similarly the Parisians who would
later draw up the Surrealist manifesto were poets, writers, and performers six years prior to
suggesting the means to materialize those ideas in objets d'art. Usually, these artists turned to
performance as a means to gain access to a wider audience and to shake up the public's attitude
toward art, life, and culture. They printed manifestoes in daily papers, arranged group events in
theatres, cafs, and in the streets,and organized public demonstrations. Such manifestations were
intended as a reaction to the prevailing art establishment and to the disproportionate influence
of critics in determining the "value" of art. But they were also aimed at halting what the Futurists
saw as a stagnation of ideas produced by a museum mentality committed largely to exhibiting
only the work of dead artists.

Although performance is now becoming generally accepted as a medium of expression in its
own right, relatively little is known about its rich and extensive evolution. Yet the discovery of this
hidden history reveals that artists have always turned to live performance as one means among
many of expressing their ideas. Examples prior to the twentieth century abound: Leonardo da
Vinci created river pageants and performed experiments related to his artwork in front of invited
audiences. Gian Lorenzo Bernini devised spectacles such as the L'lnondazione (Inundation of the
Tiber), in which Rome's Piazza Navona, flooded with water, became the scene of mock naval
battles. And in the 1890s Henri Rousseau held "soirees" in his Montmartre studio to provide
entertainment for his artist friends, including Alfred Jarry and Pablo Picasso.

Despite these isolated instances, recording the richness of performance history has been
particularly complicated, primarily because of its ephemeral nature. Like the history of the
theatre, the history of performance can be reconstructed only from scripts, texts, photographs,
and the descriptions of onlookers. Furthermore, because it verges on so many disciplines,
constructing its history necessitates the investigation of the history of theatre, of film, of music, of
opera, of mime and dance, as much as of art. These parallel studies show that performance has
more often than not been the result of the collaboration of artists from different disciplines
painters, poets, architects, dancers, magicians, and filmmakersand it was at such times, when
certain cultural capitals, be they Paris, Zurich, Berlin, Moscow, or New York, provided the context
for such collaboration, that performance flourished.

Such general observations on a medium that has only recently undergone scrutiny as a
relevant genre with its own history and conditions are built on a survey of the social and
intellectual lives, as much as the artistic output, of numerous artists. It is a story that moves from
meeting places such as the Caf Simplicissismus in Munich, the Stray Dog Caf in Saint
Petersburg, or the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich to innovative schools such as the Bauhaus and Black
"$
Mountain College. And that story is colored by political events that made it seem untimely or
irrelevant for artists to work only in the acceptable media of painting, sculpture, or drawing.

The Italian Futurists began with manifestoes and performances that reflected the political
mood that would eventually lead to the turmoil of World War I. Live performances in Paris,
Milan, Naples, London, and Saint Petersburg played an important role in their early fame. In
fact, their later painting and sculpture had less initial impact than did their outrageous
performance "declamations" against what they branded as the "past-loving" art of the museum
establishment.

Some of the most effective early Futurist performance work was executed by Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, a wealthy Alexandria-born poet who arrived in Paris in 1893 at the age of
seventeen. Determined to establish his reputation in this fiercely competitive cultural capital of
Europe, Marinetti devised a sure means to attract public attention. On February 20, 1909, he
published the initial "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" in the large-circulation Parisian
daily Le Figaro. "We will destroy the museums,
libraries, academies of every kind," it declared. "With the manifesto, we establish Futurism
because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, cicerones
and antiquarians from the numberless museums that cover her like as many graveyards."

The manifesto caused exactly the scandal that Marinetti had intended. Later, the painter
Umberto Boccioni, who had joined the cause, wrote, "we feel violently that it is our duty to shout
out the prime importance of our efforts." What followed was the first Futurist Evening, presented
at the Teatro Rosetti in Trieste in 1910. There Marinetti and his friends played on the underlying
political tension of the town as an additional element in the unrehearsed performance. They
flamboyantly declaimed the tenets of the manifesto, abusing the audience for its bourgeois values
and triggering a riot.

Public scuffles, arrests, a day or two in jail, and considerable press coverage became the typical
Futurist fare in the wake of the Trieste episode. Anticipating that their actions would be regarded
with "contempt," their 1910 "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting" declared that "the name of
'madman' with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of
honor.' The artists turned to variety theatre as a model for their performances, because it
destroyed "the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious and the Sublime in Art with a capital A."

Above all, Futurist performance was an attack on the public's notion of life and art. And the
excitement and scandal the Futurists produced reached Saint Petersburg and New York, as well as
Paris and Zurich. Within the decade similar events were being staged throughout European art
centers.

Like the Futurists, the original Zurich Dadaists came together as a group as a result of
particular political circumstancesWorld War I. Zurich was the neutral retreat for conscientious
objectors to the war, and a small bar in the Spiegelgasse became the fertile setting for Dada
performance. The Cabaret Voltaire opened its door on February 5, 1916, to a full house. For its
founderscabaret artist Emmy Hennings and poet Hugo Ballthe opening of the club was an
opportunity to re-create something of the cabaret life they had left behind in Munich. But the
founding of an art movement as such was far from their intention. The press release announcing
the cabaret opening explained that they merely wished to "create a center for artistic
entertainment."

The cabaret, which was decorated with Futurist posters and included a small stage, was soon
bursting at the seams. Participants became adept at particular performance styles. According to
contemporary accounts, Emmy Hennings sang in French and Danish, and Tristan Tzara read
"traditional style" poems, which he fished out of his various coat pockets. Richard Hlsenbeck
"%
swished his cane while reciting poems with a "Negro rhythm," and Ball invented what he called a
new species of "verse without words," or "sound poems," that he read from notes on randomly
placed music stands.

Such activities were not thought of as creating an identifiable Dada art. In fact, the term was
coined only several months after the cabaret program began. Ball believed that the insistence on
an entirely original art was pretentious and unrealistic. "The artist who works from his
freewheeling imagination is deluding himself about his originality," he wrote. "He is using a
material that is already formed and so is undertaking only to elaborate on it." The members of
the cabaret wanted instead to make it the focal point for the "newest art," presenting a spectrum
of contemporary poetry, art, and music.

Not surprisingly, in light of the differing creative energies within the group, its members
often found themselves in conflict, and Cabaret Voltaire lasted only five months. Tzara,who
wished to make an official movement out of Dada, left for Paris to join the group that would five
years later write the Surrealist manifesto. Hlsenbeck returned to Berlin, where it would not be
long before Dada Berlin was formed.

Meanwhile, the Bauhaus had opened its doors in Weimar under the direction of Walter
Gropius, who called for the unification of all the arts in a "cathedral of Socialism." A stage
workshop, the first course in performance ever given in an art school, had been discussed from
the first months as an essential aspect of the curriculum. In 1923 Oskar Schlemmer, painter and
choreographer, took over its direction.

Schlemmer's fascination with performance as a means to bring together all the arts was in
keeping with the Bauhaus ideal. His own obsession, as expressed in his painting, sculpture, and
performance, was to devise a theory of body movements in space, and it was his particular
interpretation of these various media that gave performance at the Bauhaus its special quality.
Works such as Slaf Dance (1927), Game With Building Blocks (1926), or Gesture Dance (1926)
revealed Schlemmer's methodical transition from one medium to the other; from the two-
dimensional surface of his paintings to the plastic qualities of his reliefs, and finally to the
animatedly plastic art of the human body. Ultimately, the Bauhaus developed a performance
mode entirely its own, at once more playful and more formal than its provocative Futurist and
Dadaist models.

By the end of World War II performance had clearly emerged as a medium unto itself, and its
influence spread rapidly. Bauhaus-inspired performance took place in the late 1940s at Black
Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1952 john Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor,
and Merce Cunninghamall of whom were at the collegehelped produce the now-legendary
Untitled Event, a collage of film, improvised "noise music," dance, and poetry that became the
prototypical Happening.

During the mid-1960s artists better known for their paintings and sculpture, such as Claes
Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Morris, devised extraordinary gatherings of artists and the
public. Fluxus, a movement inspired by Dada, appeared in the United States and mounted
festivals on both sides of the Atlantic.

Today, performance is as varied as its own history. Examples abound, particularly in New York
City, where art spaces such as The Kitchen Center or the Franklin Furnace in SoHo present
nightly events, focusing their programs almost exclusively on live art. The terms that have sprung
up in the 1970s to describe various aspects of performancebody art, living art, living sculpture,
autobiographyare an indication of the very different approaches to the medium taken by
contemporary artists. Indeed, the open charter of performanceanything can happen, any
number of materials can be used, and any length of time can be appropriated for the workhas
"&
resulted in an extraordinarily diverse spectrum of productions. A representative selection would
include the mix of narrative, film, and specially constructed musical instruments done by Laurie
Anderson, or Pat Oleszko's cabaretlike presentations in startling costumes. It would include work
by artists such as Joan Jonas or Meredith Monk, who for many years have worked live" almost
exclusively, or an emerging younger generation of artists such as Robert Longo or Jack Goldstein,
who use performance as one aspect of work in the related media of film, records. and wall reliefs.

Museums in the United States and Europe have acknowledged the importance of the form by
staging festivals and conferences, often funded by government agencies. Despite this official
recognition,
however, performance remains a challenge to art critics and public alike, for it continues to
question the basic criteria by which art is evaluated. The stance of performance artists has
historically been a radical one: against the establishment (be it art or politics), against the
commercialization of art, and against the strict confinement of museums and galleries.
Performance artists have acted against the overriding belief that art is limited to the production
of art objects, insisting instead that art is primarily a matter of ideas and actions. Each
performance calls on the audience to experience the making of an artwork rather than
contemplating static objects within an exhibition framework.

History shows that artists have used performance not merely as a means to attract publicity for
their seemingly wild and bohemian life-styles but also as a way of animating the many formal and
conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based. ..[T]he past should be altered by the
present as much as the present is directed by the past," wrote T. S. Eliot.
1
So, this present-day
evaluation of performance provides a special lens through which to review past art history. And if
the history of performance is any guide, it is clear that performance, whatever form it may take,
can be expected to remain a vital catalyst for the culture of the future.

1
Tradition and the Individual Talent, in The Great Critics, comp. and ed. James Harry Smith
and Edd Winfiled Parks, 3
rd
ed. Rev. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), p.715.
"'

ANNABELLE HENKIN MELZER

The Dada Actor and Performance Theory

Several contributers to this book have linked todays performance art to the Dada movement of the
early years of this century. In this essay Annabelle Henkin Melzer links performance theory to specific
Dada works and artists, including Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco, Hans Arp, and others.*
The author recognizes that the difficulty of separating the Dada artist into artistic categories is as
hopeless as it is irrelevant, and she emphasizes the element of chance as a peculiarly vital
characteristic of the art of the Dadaists.

Melzer is associate professor of theatre at the University of Tel Aviv, Israel. Her essays on
European avant-garde performance have appeared in Comparative Drama, Theatre Quarterly,
and Theatre Research International. Her book Latest Rage and the Big Drum: Dada and
Surrealist Performance (1980) was awarded the 1981 Joseph Hazan price for twentieth-century art
literature.

"Are you one of those people who call themselves dadaists ?"
"Yessir," I said, stiffly clicking my heels on Zurich's neutral soil.
"Well," he said in a paternal and almost melancholy tone of voice, "you'll be hearing from us."
"Yessir," I replied in an even stiffer tone (if that was possible). The army doctor looked
back at me as he was about to step through the doorway: "Be careful and avoid
excitement."Richard Hlsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer

It's too idiotic to be schizophrenic.CARL JUNG, on the Dada productions

The name Dada may have lent a new notoriety to the young Zurich movement but the nature
of the performing experiments, the "deeds," remained basically the same. The work with sounds
and language, with simultaneous poetry, with costuming and masks, as well as the attacks on the
audience all grew in scope and intensity. Marcel Janco captured a soiree at the Cabaret Voltaire
in a painting described by Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia:

In an overcrowded room, teeming with color, several fantastic personages are seated
on a platform: they are supposed to represent Tzara, Janco, Ball, Mrs. Hennings and your
humble servant. We are in the midst of an enormous fumult. The people about us are
shouting, laughing, gesticulating. We reply with sighs of love, salvos of hiccups, poetry, Wa
Was, and the miowings of Mediaeval Bruitists. Janco plays an invisible violin and bows
down to the ground. Mrs. Hennings, with the face of a madonna, tries to do the split.
Hlsenbeck beats incessantly on his big drum while Ball, pale as a chalk dummy,
accompanies him on the piano.

Tristan Tzara, describing "The Dada Night" of July 14, 1916, wrote:

In the presence of a compact crowd Tzara demonstrates, we demand the right to piss
in different colors, Hlsenbeck demonstrates, Ball demonstrates the dogs bay and the
dissection of Panama on the piano shouted Poemshouting and fighting in the hall,
first row approves second row declares itself incompetent the rest shout, who is the
strongest, the big drum is brought in, Hiilsenbeck against2000, Ho osenlatz? accentuated
by the very big drum and little bells on his left foot and the people protest shout smash
windowpanes kill each other demolish fight here come the police interruption.

This evening was at once the climax of the first period of Zurich Dada and the beginning of
the second phase in which Tzara's more negative, more nihilistic drives would eventually force
"(
Ball's retirement from the group. The program, perhaps because of the holiday evening (July 14,
Bastille Day), perhaps because of Tzara's growing desire to reach a larger public, had been moved
out of the confines of the Cabaret Voltaire and into the larger Zunfthaus zur Wagg. The nature of
the events remained basically the same in an evening advertised to include "music, the dance,
theory, manifestoes, poems, pictures, costumes and masks," with the participation of Arp, Ball,
Emmy Hennings, Hlsenbeck, Janco, and Tzara himself. Janco exhibited some paintings and was
also responsible for the costumes and sets. The costumes, as usual, were "en papier, en carton, en
chiffons, de toutes les couleurs, fixes avec des pingles" ("made of paper, cardboard, and scraps
of many colors, stuck together with pins"). They were perishable, temporary, ugly, absurd; all
intended to reinforce a sense of spontaneity and to fight any impression of formal, aesthetic
coordination, any adherence to "Art" with its rules and sense of the establishment. Original
musical compositions by the composer Hans Heusser were played, and a Cubist dance was
performed: "each man his own big drum on his head, noise, Negro music." Five literary
experiments were performed by Tzara "in tails before the curtain: a gymnastic poem, a concert
of vowels, a bruitist poem, a static poem, and a vowel poem. The vowel poem was simply a
sequence of vowels: a a o, i e o, a i i, and so on. The static poem involved chairs on which were
placed placards, each containing a word. A curtain was lowered and raised, each time revealing a
new ordering of the words. None of the various genres of "poem" was far from the "accidental
poem" for whose composition Tzara's instructions read:

To make a dadaist poem
Take a newspaper
Take a pair of scissors
Choose an article as long as you are planning
to make your poem
Cut out the article
Then cut out each of the words that make
up this article
and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently
Then take out the scraps one after the other
in the order
in which they left the bag
Copy consecutively.

Ball, who by this time was well into his experimentations with phonic poetry and rhythms,
performed some of his poems as well. A half year later, in March 1917, he wrote in his diary,

the human figure is progressively disappearing from pictorial art and no object is
present except in fragmentary form. This is one more proof that the human countenance
has become ugly and outworn, and that things which surround us have become objects of
revulsion. The next step is for poetry to discard language as painting has discarded the
object, and for similar reasons. Nothing like this has ever existed before.

But the art of creating such a poetry was already in progress. Ball's recollection of the reading
of his "abstract poems" on that July evening bears transcribing in full, for it is one of the clearest
descriptions
we have of a Dada "event."

I wore a special costume designed by Janco and myself. My legs were encased in a
tight-fitting cylindrical pillar of shiny blue cardboard which reached to my hips so that I
looked like an obelisk. Above this I wore a huge cardboard coat-collar, scarlet inside and
gold outside, which was fastened at the neck in such a way that I could flap it like a pair of
")
wings by moving my elbows. I also wore a high, cylindrical, blue and white striped
witchdoctor's hat.

I had set up music stands on three sides of the platform and placed on them a
manuscript, written in red crayon. I officiated at each of these music stands in turn. As
Tzara knew all about my preparations, there was a real little premidre. Everyone was very
curious. So, as an obelisk cannot walk, I had myself carried to the platform in a blackout.
Then I began, slowly and majestically.

"gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori gadjamma gramma berida bimbala
glandri galassasslaa ulitalomini gadji beri bin blassag lassalal aula lonni cadorsus assalab
im Gadiama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligia wowolimai bin beri ban

After an initial period of confusion, the audience exploded: laughing, screaming, applauding.
Ball, immobilized in his costume, faced them, motionless and unmoved.

The accents became heavier, the emphasis stronger, the consonants harsher. I very
soon realized that my powers of expression were not going to be adequate to match the
pomp of my stagingif I wanted to remain serious, and this I wanted above all things. In
the audience I saw Brupacher, Jelmoli, Laban, and Frau Wigman. Fearing a debacle, I
pulled myself together. I had now completed "Labadas Gesang an die Wolken" (Labada's
Song to the Clouds) at the music stand on my right, and Elefantenkarawane (Elephant
Caravan) on the left, and now turned back to the middle stand, flapping my wings
energetically. The heavy sequences of vowels and the ponderous rhythm of the elephants
had allowed me one last crescendo. But how could I get to the end? Then I noticed that
my voice, which had no other way out, was taking on the age-old cadence of priestly
lamentation, the liturgical chanting that wails through all the Catholic churches of East
and West.

"zimazim urallala zimazim uralla zimazim zanzibar zimzalla zam elifantolim brussala
bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata veio da bang bang affalo purzamai affalo purzamai
lengado ter"

I do not know what gave me the idea of using this music, but I began to chant my
vowel sequences like a recitative, in liturgical style, and tried not only to keep a straight
face but to compel myself to be in earnest. For a moment I seemed to see, behind the
Cubist mask, the pale, anguished face of the ten-year-old boy who, at parish requiems and
high masses, had hung on the priest's every word, avid, and trembling. Then the electric
lights went out as arranged, and, bathed in sweat, I was carried down from the platform, a
magical bishop.

Ball was perfectly aware of the primitive and "magical" import of his metrical and phonetic
experiments: "We have charged the word with forces and energies which made it possible for us
to rediscover the evangelical concept of the 'word' (logos) as a magical complex of images." In his
writing Ball withdrew to the "innermost alchemy of the word," surrendering the word as a
promoter of logic in favor of Tzara's dictum "thought is made in the mouth." It was in
performance, however, that the impact of the spontaneously formed, alogical, rhythmJinked
word reached its full power. With drumbeats in the background and with a dead-serious
expression on his face, Ball presented himself, a multicolored obelisk, before his audience. The
three music stands on which his texts of phonic poetry rested demarcated the boundaries of his
small stage. The tubular cardboard shapes encasing him prevented almost any movement but the
mock-heroic flapping of his wings. They were of the same ready-made materials as the other Dada
costumes: cardboard tacked and pasted, and patches of colored paint. Ball's priestly garb as well
as his tubular costume on another Dada occasion, both products of the rectilinear vocabulary of
#+
Cubism, are striking in their resemblance to the "abstract-puppets" of Hans Arp and his wife,
Sophie Tuber, as well as to the conical forms of Fortunato Depero's Futurist figures.

The puppets, which consisted mostly of thread spools joined together, were used in
performances at the Cabaret Voltaire.
1
Their mechanical and robotlike appearance was
occasionally relieved

by a bit of feather or a drape of rag, but by and large they

were formed like
the Futurist figures and Ball's cardboard encasement

of geometric shapes and harsh joints, of
chimney heads and

pointers for hands. The actor had been abstracted, and the Dada

costume
itself stood as a reaction against the "arts" of sewing and design, against permanence, and against
any sort of subtlety in

characterization. Ball's costume and others' consistently evoke the

feeling of
a school play, a masquerade, or a birthday party: something

infantile, amateurish, and hastily put together. This attraction to the childlike is linked to the
Dadaists at many levels. The phonetic gibberish and cacophony of natural sound that the Dada
performer reveled in is as suggestive of childish regression as the name Dada itself. Ball wrote that
the aim of the Dadaist was to "surpass oneself in naivet and childishness." He described in no
uncertain terms his unswerving attraction to childhood: "childhood as a new world, and
everything childlike and phantastic, everything childlike and direct, everything childlike and
symbolical in opposition to the senilities of the world of grown ups." Throughout the pranks,
both social and artistic, one cannot avoid the sensation of a group of highly sophisticated "bad"
kids, justifying the acting out of their libidinal and asocial impulses by working within the
institutionalized (although they would deny it) framework of a movement that, thereby, gave
them the prerogatives of assembly, publicity, and pontification. I do not mean this to sound as
damning as it does, but there is an unequivocal sense that the Dadaists created their art despite
all their declared efforts to the contrary. If there was to be no art, then all Dada efforts were to be
good substitutes for it.

I return to Ball, to the costumed performer carried onstage in darkness and suddenly
revealed to begin his incantatory chants. All this was meant to arouse and shock the audience, yet
one has the feeling here (a feeling corroborated by the performer's own recounting of the
event), and in other Dada events as well, that the ensemble of performer(s), costume, mask,
phonetic text, and drum, plus the permission to ululate and crow to one's heart's content was
intended to affect the performer as much as to work its effect on the public. In the Dadaist
struggle for primacy between process and product, process emerged the victor, and as with much
of contemporary psychophysically oriented theatre,
2
one often has the uneasy feeling (uneasy
because it places the spectator at a disadvantage) that the actor is having a fuller, more satisfying
experience than the audience. This sensation pervades almost all encounters with the Dadaists in
performance (and changes significantly when we approach the later theatrical works of the
Surrealists).

While Ball is carried off in a state of such fevered exaltation that it results in his nervous
collapse, the audience is at best roused to "shouting and fighting in the hall," and one can even
find "several elderly Englishwomen taking careful notes." This is not to minimize the hurly-burly
in the audience on repeated occasions but to focus on the audience's basic remove (or distance)
from what was going on onstage as opposed to the performer's intense involvement. The quality
of experience the performer desired for himself was different from what he wished to present to
the audience. To his audience he said, "I will make you a Dadaist by inciting your indignation. I
will shake your bourgeois bastion of complacency by tomfoolery, infantilism, contempt for
venerated critical standards, and the use of vulgar language. I will preach accident and
irrationality." And, for the audience, the performance remained largely an experience of
agitation and arousal. For the performer, however (let the Dadaists say what they will about their
antiart predilections), the performing experience was an artistic one.

There was, however, another, more intimate audience whose presence cannot be ignored and
whose experience of the performance more closely resembled the Dada performer's own. That
#*
audience was the Dada group itself. There can be little doubt that the Dadaists created and
performed for one another with at least as much relish as they manipulated their audiences. The
importance of "the group" was paramount. In the Caf de la Terrasse, their first meeting place in
Zurich, Tzara, Serner, and Arp together wrote a cycle of poems titled The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's
Hairdresser and the Walking Stick. The meeting place soon shifted to the Odon (in sympathy with a
waiters' strike at the Terrasse) where two or three tables were not sufficient to hold the Dadaists'
burgeoning circle of friends. They wound up reserving half of the Rami Strasse corner of the
Odon for themselves. Here, the group sat for hours, introducing one another to those various
people who chanced into their midst: Dr. Oscar Goldberg, the numerologist; Erich Unger, who
had studied classical philosophy and the Cabala; the heavy-bearded Augusto Giacometti; and the
fiery Spaniard del Vajo, who vied with Ball for the affections of Emmy Hennings. It was open
house every day, but the center held. If it was not at the Odon, the group might be at Hack's
bookshop or at Laban's ballet school, where the Dadaists established both permanent and
fleeting emotional ties with the young dancers Mary Wigman, Sophie Tduber (who became Mrs.
Hans Arp), Susanne Perrottet, Maria Vanselow (who went around with Janco's brother, Georges),
and Maya Kruseck (Tzara's petite amie). When the caf sessions waned, a number of the group
might walk along the Limmatquai, opening one restaurant door after another to shout within,
Vive, Dada! And then there was always the work of putting out the journal Cabaret Voltaire and its
successor Dada, or working on the editions of the Dada Library, which succeeded in bringing out
two publications: Tzara's short play, La premire aventure cleste de M. Antipyrine, with illustrations by
Janco; and Hlsenbeck's Fantastick Prayers, illustrated by Arp. The evenings found them reunited
at the Cabaret, where they often stayed till the early hours of the morning: "I go home in the
morning light/The clock strikes five, the sky grows pale,/A light still burns in the hotel;/The
cabaret shuts for the night" (Emmy Hennings). Hennings went home with Ball, Janco, and Arp to
their respective lodgings, and Richter and Tzara to adjoining rooms in the Hotel Limmatquai.
Even for the night the group barely separated.

Under these conditions the importance of the group's individual members is not surprising.
The evening programs were undoubtedly planned over rounds of coffee and beer (together),
and the programs themselves hashed over the next day. Again coffee, again together. The circle
of people who understood and delighted in the series of nightly devotions and exorcisms was
generally limited to that very circle of people who perpetrated the activities. First and foremost,
however, the Dada actor performed for himself,
in search of himself. In accord with Apollinaire's poem "Cortge,"

One day
One day
I said to myself Guillaume it's time you turned up
So I could know just who I am . . .
All those who turned up and were not myself
Brought one by one the pieces of myself

the Dadaists tracked the "pieces of themselves": Ball in his incantatory "trips," Hrilsenbeck
banging on the big drum, and Tzara codifying the principle by writing, "Art is a private afiair, the
artist produces it for himself." Richter as well points to the importance of individual creation for
each member of the group: "The Cabaret Voltaire was a six-piece band. Each played his
instrument, i.e., himself, passionately and with all his soul. Each of them, difierent as he was from
all the others, was his own music, his own words. His own rhythm. Each sang his own song with all
his might." The compartmented structure of the soiree was ideal for accommodating both the
individual performer as well as groups disporting themselves in the spotlight.

Most significant in this performing for oneself, which the Dadaists practiced, is the liberating
creative method which it fostered and out of which it grew. "The artist cedes a measure of his
control (and hence of his ego) to the materials and what transpires between them, placing
#"
himself partially in the role of discoverer or spectator as well as that of originator.
3
The element
of "chance" and the "spontaneous act" took on new significance for performer and artist. Chance
is the basis of Tzara's paper-bag poetry (shake the words) and much of Arp's poetry as well. He
explained: "I tore apart sentences, words, syllables. I tried to break down the language into atoms,
in order to approach the creative Chance opened up perceptions to me, immediate spiritual
insights." Hans Richter recounts in an anecdote the workings of chance in Arp's painting:

Dissatisfied with a drawing he had been working on for some time, Arp finally tore it
up, and let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio on the Zeltweg. Some time later he
happened to notice these same scraps of paper as they lay on the floor, and was struck by
the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power that he had tried in vain to
achieve. How meaningful! How telling! Chance movements of his hand and of the
fluttering scraps of paper had achieved what all his efforts had failed to achieve, namely
expression. He accepted this challenge from chance as a decision of fate and carefully
pasted the scraps down in the pattern which chance had determined.

Arp himself attempted to record the process of his improvisational methodology in working
on his "automatic drawings." The starting point in the creation of these works was the notion of
vitality in the
movement of the creative hand. First the artist would paint an entirely black surface.

The black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like
a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought
comes to me to exorcize and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already
become a surface. Now I have lost all fear and begin to draw on the black surface. I draw
and dance at once, twisting and winding, twining soft, white flowery round. A snail-like
wreath turns in, grows. While shoots dart this way and that. Three of them begin to
form snakes' heads. Cautiously the two lower ones approach one another.
4


Some art historians see Arp's use of chance only as a way of stimulating the imagination and
as a starting point for images that were later consciously rearranged. Although this possibility of
rearrangement may be granted the painter and the poet, it is hardly viable for the unrehearsed
Dada performer. Ball came on stage, costumed and text-laden, with only the most general idea of
what he was going to do. In his work with Janco's masks, Ball improvised on the spot a piece of
music for the dances, which themselves emerged out of movements five minutes before,
unanticipated and unpredictable. "What we want now," Tzara explained, "is spontaneity. Not
because it is better or more beautiful than anything else. But because everything that issues freely
from ourselves without the intervention of speculative ideas represents us." When the internal
factor alone weighed in the balance, then no acquired technique was necessary for the creation
of a work of art. The works of children and madmen were the ones to be admired and emulated.
And chance was the only saving force that could liberate the artist from centuries of restrictive
rationality.
5
All of these Dada notions did not, of course, emerge full-blown from a vacuum. In
1919 Paul Kammerer wrote a book called The Law of Seriality, which attempted to develop a theory
around "dreamlike" associations and to discover the laws governing acausal relationships. Carl
Gustav Jung wrote of "the power of attraction of the relative, as if it were the dream of a greater,
to us unknowable Consciousness." The first book on children's art had been translated into
German, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner "discovered" the "primitive" arts of Africa and Oceania in
the Dresden Ethnological Museum. Were the Dadaists really open to the subconscious, or merely
involved with a series of jesting situations that relied on the element of chance for their ultimate
form? Jacques Rivire, in his "Reconnaissance Dada," argues for the former:

Saisir l'tre avant qu'il n'ait cd la compatibilit, I'atteindre dans son incohrence
ou mieux sa cohrence primitive, avant que I'ide de contradiction ne soit apparue et ne
##
I'ait forc i se rduire, se construire; substituer son unit logique, forcment acquise,
son unit absurde seule originelle.
6

(To seize being, before it had surrendered to consistency, overtaking it in its
coherence, or better still, its primitive coherence before the notion of contradiction had
appeared, forcing it to be limited, framed; to substitute for its logical unity acquired by
force, its absurd unity which alone is primordial.)

Although I have spoken of "chance" in the paintings of Arp, the poems of Tzara, and the
performing of Ball, I must remark that trying to separate the Dada artist into plastic artist,
littrateur, and theatre person is as hopeless as it is irrelevant. The elements of chance,
spontaneity, and the immediacy of the creative act were championed by painters, poets, and
performers alike. It is impossible not to mention the experiments in painting by members of the
Dada group as a part of their theatrical work. The Laban dancers danced in front of Arp's
biomorphic cucumbers: products of an experiment to provoke the internal psychological
processes and emerge with a "plastic representation of an internal event." Ernst's collages are the
visual counterpart of the simultaneous poem, instantaneously presenting contradictory data in
the tradition of Lautramont's "chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a
dissection table," while Apollinaire's radical defense ofollage and, papiers colls in The Cubist
Painters (1913) opened the
way not only for an incredible liberation of the plastic arts but of the performing arts as well.
He stated: "You may paint with whatever material you please, with pipes, postage stamps,
postcards, or playing cards, candelabras, pieces of oilcloth, collars, painted paper, newspaper."
The art repertoire had been expanded to all existing sights and objects. Art, no longer in the
service of religion, ethics, history, or government, saluted an end to descriptive content. If
painting increasingly sought "the possibilities of painting," then theatre, searching for the
possibilities of theatre, returned to its origins in the actor as performer.

A word more about the Dada actor: if we divide the body of actors into three major varieties:
the skilled actor, the masked actor, and the personal actor, such a division may be helpful in
understanding the Dada performer by relating him to this last group. The skilled actor is one
most clearly recognized by the skill he presents before the audience: the acrobat and his bodily
contortions, the tightrope walker and his daring abilities. Rather than seeing the actor (him), we
see the skill (it). We look at the actor's virtuosity; we are thrilled and aghast at what he can do that
we cannot. The Dada performer had no skill. With the exception of Laban's dancers (who,
although they were not Dadaists, did participate in Dada performance), no Dadaist who ventured
on stage did so with a performing skill greater than that of the average artist in the street. That he
had more daring (and quite specific and driving motivation for his performances) is for the
moment beside the point. The Dadaist was not a skilled performer.

The masked actor works behind a mask or role. He is most simply the actor within the
traditional play. Watching him perform, we know him as Faustus or Oedipus and, with our
"willing suspension of disbelief," we allow him to take us into the life of his character. He will
excite us only as much as we are moved by the character he "lives" on the stage. Afterward, the
more sophisticated may comment, "look at who he [the actor] can become." The average
spectator will remain entranced by the mask. No one ever went home from the Cabaret Voltaire
speaking of the characters X or Y, and although the Dadaists used real masks, they never so lost
themselves to the mask that one was not always aware, "Oh, there's Tzara, kicking up his feet."

The Dada actor was the personal actor, tied always onstage to the name, the identity that
marked his offstage life. In this, he is most readily recognized as the nightclub star: Frank Sinatra,
who sings to us as Frank Sinatra; Buddy Hackett, the stand-up comedian, who throughout his
shenanigans remains Buddy Hackett. Film and television have blurred these distinctions by
deifying the actor. They have washed out the line between the personal and the masked
performer. We can hardly look at Dustin Hofiman in a role
#$
without seeing Dustin Hoffrnan. The theatre still manages to retain some of the categorical
difference. On the Dada stage at the Cabaret Voltaire, however, the actors were Tristan Tzara,
Hugo Ball. Marcel Janco, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, and so forth, for the public at large. The
audience never lost sight of the performer as an identifiable person, and as for the actor, Tzara
presented Tzara, and Ball presented Ball.

The personal actor, then, outfitted either in his clothes of everyday or in the hastily put-
together trappings of some outlandish masquerade, performed his menu of phonetic intonings,
masked dances, and rhythmic instrumentals. Michael Kirby calls the setting for these
performances a nonmatrixed environment. Kirby speaks of the performer in traditional theatre
as performing within a matrix, a created world of time, place, and character (see "On Acting and
Not-Acting"). The Dada performer, inasmuch as he is a personal actor, performs outside the
matrix of character and time. The time is now, the performer is himself. There are no "given
circumstances." The actor works within no physical setting. The stage, the small, slightly raised
platform at the Cabaret Voltaire or the larger stages of the "provocation performances," was
usually bare, or furnished with an occasional backdrop of abstract shapes painted by the members
of the group, for example, the one painted by Arp and Richter for one of the grandes soires.
Richter has described it: "We began from opposite ends of immensely long strips of paper about
two yards wide, painting huge black abstracts. Arp's shapes looked like gigantic cucumbers. I
followed his example and we painted miles of cucumber plantations before we finally met in
the middle. Then the whole thing was nailed onto pieces of wood and rolled up until the
performance."

Performing before such a backdrop, never within it, the Dada actor worked in completely
"unlocalized" space. The stage represented no place, it was the stage. It was important that it
remain a stage, a clear dividing line between the actor and the audience. For all their innovative
work in performance, the Dadaists guarded the line that separates actor from audience. It was not
the proscenium that they protected (for they had no need of a picture frame of any sort to
confine a theatre of illusion) but the slightly thrust stage of the presentational performer, a stage
that allows him at times to address his audience directly and then again to withdraw to a position
where the audience must regard him as separate from itself.

The evening of Ball's triumphant bishopry saw the first production of Tzara's La premire
aventure cyleste de M. Antipyrine, a play in one act capped by a lengthy manifesto-monologue. The
manifesto was recited by "Tristan Tzara," whose name was listed in the text in the same way that
the fictitious character names preceded their individual speeches. In addition to'fzara there were
nine other characters: Messrs. Bleubleu, Cricri, Boum Boum, Antipyrine (the hero of the title),
Pipi, Npala Garroo, La Parapole, and Le Directeur. Also La Femme Enceinte. We do not know
who played what role, although we do have the cast list for the play's second performance in Paris
in 1920. Because Tzara played the role designated him in the text in Paris, it is likely that he did
the same in Zurich. The text, with woodcuts by Janco, was published on July 28, 1916, in an
edition limited to ten copies. Janco's woodcuts are abstract and offer no iconographic evidence
about the Zurich production. The text itself has no stage directions. What we are left with, then,
is a text of some 238 lines divided among ten characters. At first reading the text is a maze of
impenetrable phrases strung one after the other, interspersed with pseudo-African words (Soso
Bgai Affahous), phonetic gibberish (diin aha dzin aha bobobo), and freestanding vowels and
syllables (oi oi oi oi uu u u n pht). The title itself is a source of confusion, because "Antipyrine"
has been translated as "Fire Extinguisher," but the word was also the name of a common Swiss
headache remedy. The emphasis is quite clearly on sound rather than on meaning in the
repetition of syllables ("immense, panse, pense et pense pense la cathedrale, drale drale
rendre, prendre, entre"), in internal and half rhymes ("amertume sans glise allons allons
charbon chameau/ synthtise amertume sur l'glise isisise les rideaux/dododo"), in the names of
the characters with their childish doubleness (Cricri, Pipi), and in the clearly alogical syntax and
#%
non sequiturs we recognize from the verbal collages of the Zurich Dadaist simultaneous poems,
"la fivre puerperale dentelles et SO2H4/je pousse usine dans le cirque Pskow."

In his use of the exotic rhythmic words of a pseudo-African tongue, Tzara merely followed the
same muse that led him to write of the art of Africa and Oceania, to seek out the African drum
rhythms and use them to shock the sensibilities of the Zurich bourgeoisie. The handiest
reference a Continental burgher of 1916 had to the man of the dark continent was an image of
the towering Senegalese mercenary brought to fight in the front lines of the war. From this he
might well conclude that they were savages, an impression
reinforced in the play by the coupling of exotic Africanisms with the fantasy images of sex and
excrement: "L'organe sexuel est carr est de plomb est plus/gros que le volcan et s'envole au
dessus de Mgabati/le grand nomm Bleubleu grimpe dans son/dsespoir et y chie ses
manifestations." Add to this a series of
lists without purpose, "Quatre-cents chevaux soixante chameaux trois/cents peaux de
zibelines cinq cents peaux d'hermines,/son mari est malade,/vingt peaux de renard jaunes trois
peaux de chlizun/cents peaux de renard blancs et jaunes and two simultaneously recited
poems of phonetic chants, and the Dada aim of incensing its public was sure to be achieved.

Tzara termed the text a double quatralogue. It begins with the introduction of four characters:
Bleubleu, Cricri, La Femme Enceinte, and Mr. Antipyrine, each reciting his own introductory
monologue. The four, plus Pipi, exchange ripostes, which on paper resemble dialogue, yet are
incomprehensible both in themselves and in their relationships one to another. The play's
opening lines seem to indicate activity such as might be given in a stage direction: "pntre le
desert,/creuse en hurlant le chemin dans le
sable gluant,/coute la vibration

In looking at the text that follows, however, it is difficult to propose (or forbid) any activities
whatever that might have been associated with the text, or to justify in any way the dividing of the
play into analyzable segments. What strikes the reader instead are a few "numbers" or "acts"
within the piece. There are two simultaneous poems bringing together first one and then another
combination of the five characters met thus far and then introducing the sixth, Le Directeur, who
says two of the play's more coherent lines:
"il est mort," and then "puis ils chantrent." The latter is followed by a "song" in the form of
the second simultaneous poem. Outstanding as well is Tzara's long monologue. Suddenly in the
midst of all the confusion comes a manifesto, clearly didactic and quite comprehensible. The
show stops for a moment and its chief barker permits himself a few choice words that, if there
were any doubts, make clear the Dadaists' purposeful violation of the audience: "C'est tout de
mme de la merde, mais nous voulons dornavant chier en couleurs diverses, pour orner le
jardin zoologique de l'art de tous les drapeaux des consulats" ("It's shit after all, but we intend
henceforth to shit in various colors, to decorate the zoo or art with the flags of all the
consulates"). The insertion of the monologue seems to suggest that Tzara was taking no chances.
If, for some reason, the audience "took to" the phonetic gibberish of the play, or merely laughed,
Tzara had provided himself with an infallible instrument of attack in the form of the manifesto.
Not many Frenchmen could avoid being offended by the short rhyming lines: "psychologie
psychologie hi hi/Science Science Science/vive la France" (especially in the light of all that came
before), and to top it all off, Tzara ended with kisses to the audience, "bons auditeurs, je vous
aime tant, je vous aime tant, je vous assure, et je vous adore" ("good listeners, I love you so, I love
you so, I do assure you and I do adore you").

Two long monologues bring the play to its concluding line, "puis ils s'en allrent," which is
truly an exit line.

#&
All told, there is little to hold on to. What seems to move the play more than the energy of a
comprehensible activity is the acoustical energy, the thrust of the music of the lines, which, in
performance, was augmented by the shape of the audience's response.

Nothing is known of the Zurich performance. We can put together some details of the Paris
premire three and a half years later. As Tzara participated in both productions, it is possible that
elements of the first carried over into the second. More likely, though, with the passage of time,
within the new Paris-Dadaist framework, and with new collaborating artists (it was Francis Picabia
who designed the Paris costumes and sets, not Marcel Janco), the performance in no way
resembled the first. The scenic details of this second production, however, may serve to hint at a
conception of staging that is recognizable as not so different from the Zurich-Dadaist
performances.

For the occasion Tzara had invented "a diabolical machine composed of a Klaxon and three
successive invisible echoes, for the purpose of impressing on the mind of the audience certain
phrases describing the aims of Dada." The sets and costumes (the characters enclosed in huge,
variously colored paper sacks, each with his name written on a large placard and hung around his
neck) were described by the critic of Commoedia as: "tonnants, imprvus, ridicules" ("shocking,
unexpected, ridiculous"). He continued:

Ils voquent nettement les dessins imagins par les foux et correspondent
parfaitement au texte inconcevable de M. Tristan Tzara Le dcor, plac en avant des
interprtes et non en arrire, le dcor transparent, compos d'une roue de bicyclette, de
quelques cordes tendues travers la scne et de cadres contenant des inscriptionsh
ermtiques( "La paralysiee st le commencemendt e la sagesse,""V ous tendezl esb ras,v osa
misv ousl es couperont") compltait parfaitementl 'ensemble. (They clearly evoked
esignsim gained by fools and correspond perfectly with the inconceivable text of M.
Tristan Tzara... The decor, placed in front of the interpreters and not behind the
transparent dcor, composed of a bicycle, of some cords extended through the scene, and
of frames containing hermetical inscriptions ["Paralysis is the beginning of wisdom," "You
extend your arms, your friends will cut them"] completing perfectly the ensemble.)

Tzara's own recollections of the play's performance and the audience's reaction are quite
clear. "This play is a boxing match with words. The characters, confined in sacks and trunks,
recite their parts without moving, and one can easily imagine the effect this produced
performed in a greenish lighton the already excited public. It was impossible to hear a single
word of the play."

By the summer of 1916 both internal and external pressures determined the closing of the
Cabaret Voltaire six months after it had opened. Herr Ephraim, the proprietor, fed up with
public complaints
at the nightly excesses committed on his premises, announced that the Dadaists would have to
seek a new home. Tensions between Tzara and Ball had also reached a crisis that made it
desirable for the group to split up for a while. The split, however, was short-lived, and in March
1917 the two men again joined together to open the Galerie Dada.

This "one last try" lasted four months, and by June 1917 the Galerie Dada went on "unlimited
vacation." Ball was spent and tormented. He did not want to leave the gallerv. but his views and
Tzara's on the development of Dada theatrics became more and more at odds. Tzara was rapidly
moving away from all modern art toward a path of pure provocation, a "new transmutation that
signifies nothing, and was the most formidable blasphemy mass combat speed prayer tranquility
private guerrilla negation and chocolate of the desperate." For Ball, who finally declared, "I have
examined myself carefully and I could never bid chaos welcome," the split with Tzara was final.
Ball left Zurich for good at the end of June 1917, while Tzara in a euphoric mood at his new
#'
emergent leadership wrote in his diary, "Mysterious creation! magic revolver The DADA
MOVEMENT is launched." Yet Tzara's "victory" was a slightly tarnished one. One interesting
proof of Dada's fundamentally theatrical base was its need for constantly virginal audiences. The
years in Zurich had virtually used up such a public. The group too had fed on itself for too long.
Dada moved on and, in 192O,Tzara packed his bags for Paris.

*Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from the following sources, Robert Motherwell,
ed., The Dada Poets and Painters (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951); Georges Hugnet,
LAventure Dada 1916-1922 (Paris, 1971); Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1965); Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting (New York: Grove Press, 1960);
Edmund Wilson, Axels Castle (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1931); and Michel Sanouillet,
Dada Paris (Paris 1965).
1
Little is known of the Dada work with puppets. Hugnet mentions couplets satyriques de
Ball contre-limprialisme allemande et ses Krippen Spiele (jeux de crche), figures par les
poupes de Emmy Hennings (Balls satirical couplets against German imperialism and his
Krippen Spiele [manger play], presented by the puppets of Emmy Hennings). Hans Richter
recalls the puppets Arp and Tuber made were the first abstract puppets ever used at puppet
showsThey moved with a grace not of this earth and would have outcircused even Calders
circus in their purity.
2
The term is Grotowskis, but it refers not only to the type of work done in his Polish Lab
Theatre, but also to the work of such groups as Joseph Chaikens Open Theatre, the Becks
Living Theatre, and Richard Schechners Performance Group.
3
William G. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 37.
4
Hans Arp, On My Way: Poetry and Essays, 1912-1947, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York:
Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), p. 52.
5
The creative approach of the chance factor is by no means an invention of contemporary
artists. Pliny the Elder tells that Protogenes of Rhodes, upset at his attempts to draw the lather
around a horses mouth, hurled a sponge at the picture. The sponge deposited the colours with
which it was charged in the very manner which he had sought in vain, and thus chance
constructed nature in a painting.
6
Jacques Rivire, Reconnaissance Dada, Nouvelle Revue Franaise (August 1920).
#(

KEN FRIEDMAN

Fluxus Performance

According to Ken Friedman, defining Fluxus has always been problematic, but through a brief
introduction of its origins and descriptions of performable pieces by a number of artists, he conveys
much of the spirit, humor, and diversity of Fluxus performance.

He writes: Fluxus began primarily as a publishing and performance program conceived by
several artists, many of whom had studied with John Cage. Citing the publication of An
Anthology, which he calls the early major anthology of performance art, Conceptual art, Minimal
art, event structures, and related forms, he identifies in Fluxus elements of Zen, vaudeville, and
ritual. Friedman goes on to describe performances by George Brecht, Robert Watts, Alison Knowles,
Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, and Milan Knizack, as well as some of his own.

Ken Friedman leads two lives: as a Fluxus artist he is exhibited around the world and is collected
by institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Kunstmuseum, Basel; as Kenneth S.
Friedman he is editor of The Art Economist. An expert on the sociology and economics of art, Dr.
Friedman is a consultant to corporations and publishing houses.

IWhat Is (or Was) Fluxus?

Fluxus germinated in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a group of artists, composers, and
performers who came together to present innovative works and projects that had no home in the
art world of
their time. No one has ever succeeded in defining Fluxus to the satisfaction of its many
members and participants. The group has been characterized at various times as a movement, a
cooperative, a
school, and a philosophy. The real structure of Fluxus lies somewhere among these.

The success (and the occasional failure) of Fluxus consisted in its remaining flexible and
open to new growth, to an opportune revision of experience. Flums was as experimental in
practice as it was in philosophy.

There is no consensus among Fluxus members whether or not Fluxus still exists; whether a
Fluxus participant creates one set of works that is "Fluxus" and another that is private; or whether
Fluxus is defined by its participants, all of whose work must therefore be considered "Fluxus
work."

Fluxus is remarkably hardy. Fluxus artist and videoteur Nam June Paik (who began as a
composer) says that "Fluxus is like a Korean plant: when it looks dead, it's about to blossom." The
territory covered by Fluxus has been so large and varied that any description of Fluxus can be
somewhat confusing. One can begin just about anywhere in explaining just what Fluxus is, or was.

A few things are clear.

Fluxus began loosely, primarily as a publishing and performance program conceptualized by
several artists. A common bond among some of them was the fact that they had studied with John
Cage in his famous courses at the New School for Social Research in New York. Others were more
generally influenced by Cage and his Zen-inflected philosophy. One artist, architect, and
architectural historian, George Maciunas, seemed to take on a role as provisional chairman to the
Fluxus "posse comitatus," if only by virtue of the fact that he was willing to manage organizational
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matters. Maciunas, passionately energetic and madly methodical, proceeded to contact nearly
every kindred spirit in the worlds of art,
music, theatre, dance, and poetry. He invited them to participate in a rigorously structured
series of programs, concerts, and publications envisioned under the rubric "Fluxus."

Some participants stuck. Some came unglued while remaining friendly colleaguesor distant
colleaguesdepending on who might at any moment have been feuding with whom. One
landmark
venture was the early major anthology of performance art, Conceptual art, Minimal art, event
structures, and related forms published by Jackson Maclow and La Monte Young, designed by
Maciunas, titled simply An Anthology. Originally prepared for publication in 1961, it was released
in 1963. Since then, it has been reprinted widely both in pirate editions (distributed at no cost to
interested artists around the world, nearly 1,000 copies sent out in all) and in authorized
reprints, such as that issued by Heiner Friedrich in 1968. An Anthology has long since become one
of the classic texts of art-making, not only for the artists on whom it exercised direct influence but
also indirectly for the artists whose thinking was shaped in the era of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The roster of participants in Fluxus took its basic shape by the year 1964 or so and continued
to expand through late 1966. Harald Szeemann and Hanns Sohm prepared a fairly definitive list
of the first generation of Fluxus artists for the catalogue to the major 1970 exhibition "Fluxus &
Happenings" at the Kolnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany. The artists included were:

Eric Andersen, Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Henning Christiansen, Phil Corner,
Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, Bici Forbes Hendricks, Geoff Hendricks, Dick
Higgins, Hi Red Center, Joe Jones, Per Kirkeby, Bengt af Klintberg, Milan Knizak, Alison
Knowles, Addi Koepcke, Takehisa Kosugi, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Robin Page, Nam June
Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri,
Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Bob Watts, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young, and Zaj.

By 1982, the twentieth anniversary of the first widely publicized Fluxus concerts (1972 had
earlier been declared the "Tenth Anniversary" to coincide with the Fluxus exhibition year in
England), a number of major exhibitions had taken place including significant artists who had
not been shown extensively in Cologne. The well-known Silverman Collection, one of America's
largest collections of Fluxus objects and artifacts, was seen at Cranbrook Academy of Art in
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York. Retrospective
Fluxus exhibitions were presented at Wuppertal and Wiesbaden in Germany. Other major shows
were staged elsewhere in the years previous. Artists included in these exhibitions who were not
given solo rooms or major participation in Cologne included:

Albrecht D., John Armleder, Jeff Berner, Peter van Beveren, Don Boyd, Robert Bozzi,
Giuseppe Chiari, Willem de Ridder, Jean Dupuy, Felipe Ehrenberg, Rimma and Valery Gerlovin,
Davi det Hompson, Alice Hutchins, Vytautas Landsbergis, John Lennon, Frederic Liebermann,
Carla Liss, Joan Mathews, David Mayor, Tommy Mew, Larry Miller, Kate Millett, peter Moore,
Charlotte Moorman, Olivier Mosset, Maurizio Nannucci, Serge Oldenburg, Jock Reynold, James
Riddle, Peter van Riper, Takako Saito, Wlm. T. Schippers, Greg Sharits, Paul Sharits, Al Souza,
Tamas Szentjauby, Yasunao Tone, Endre Tot, Brank Vucicevic, and Yoshimasa Wada.

Most of these individuals are considered by many commentators to be key members of Fluxus
in one of several regards. Although the lists vary and although many memberparticipants have
come and gone around the core defined at Cologne, the constellation of individuals and their
interaction remains as fascinating as it was and ambiguous in equal measure.

At only two or three times has Fluxus been "organized', in any usual sense. The first instance
was in the formative stage, when Maciunas had prepared lists of national committees, chairs,
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editors, and directors, most of whom never actively fulfilled their assigned roles. The second was
in a brief, lucid period of heavy publishing and concert making between about 1964 and 1967,
managed through an organizational structure defined by Maciunas in 1966 (and commemorated
on organizational stationery that he published) listing Per Kirkeby, Ben Vautier, Milan Knizak,
Ken Friedman, and George himself as the five "directors" of Fluxus, such as it was. The final
moment of clearly structured activity came in the early 1970s, when Fluxus West in England
presented the Fluxus Year and Fluxshoe under the leadership of David Mayor and Michael
Weaver, sponsored by the University of Exeter and its American Arts Documentation Centre.


No one really knows who invented the name Fluxus. It has been defined in many ways,
relating to "states of flux," "confusion," "a bloody evacuation of the bowels," "spatial and temporal
instability," and many more. Scholars offer differing theories. It is significant to the nature and
identity of Fluxus that there has never been a precise recorded definition of the name, a fact that
accounts in part for its generative and regenerative strength.

llFluxus Performonce

Fluxus attitudes toward performance have been as varied and individual as the artist-
participants themselves. There are leanings toward Zen in austere and often ritual works by
George Brecht, Bob Watts, Mieko Shiomi, Alison Knowles, Shigeko Kubota, and others. Much of
the Fluxus performance work has been made available in boxes of collated scores and event
notations. the best known of these being the George Brecht box Water Yam, published in 1963.
Similar collections of work by Bob Watts, Mieko Shiomi, Takehisa Kosugi and Ben Vautier were
published. Boxes of events were planned for Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ken Friedman,
George Maciunas, and others. Most of the event works of these artists were eventually produced
by publishers other than Fluxus. Maciunas's own events and scores paradoxically remain
unpublished, appearing for the most part as occasional single works.

A look at a few scores will illustrate the "Fluxus Zen" attitude. For example, Brecht's Word
Event (1961) simply reads "Exit." There is a variation that states, "Audience is instructed to leave
theatre." It is clear that the piece can be performed theatrically, as a visual event in a gallery
context, or as a private ritual. Some events take on further potential, such as Brecht's Three
Aqueous Events (also 1961): "Ice. Water. Steam." This piece not oniy permits performance as
theatre but can easily be extended to film, radio, or even television. In the context of extended
performance structures Three Aqueous Events can be understood as a description of physical
processes taking place in real time on a daily, global basis. Brecht's continual revision of the
boundaries between performance and life typifies Fluxus Zen.

Robert Watts's work tends to be more pointedly performable. Some of the performances seem
private in nature, even though intended for public space. Casual Event (f962) is one such work:
"Performer drives car to filling station to inflate right front tire. He continues to inflate tire until
tire blows out. He changes tire and drives home. If car is newer model, he drives home on blown
out tire."

Some Watts events, despite their ephemeral, private sensibility, become manifestly public in
their acknowledgment of the audience. One such event is Two lnches (also 1962): "Two inch
ribbon is stretched across stage or street, then cut."

Some of the works are designed for sculptural installation, even for a specific space, as was
Event for Guggenheim (1963): "A very heavy pendulum, suspended by steel wire from a high dome,
is permitted to swing over a concave layer of fine sand on the floor, inscribing thus rotation of
swing according to rotation of the earth."

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Watts, like Brecht, has had a strong though varied career as a visual artist, showing at such
galleries as Leo Castelli in the early 1960s. Watts was considered, at different periods, both a Pop
artist and a Minimalist. The variety of his performance pieces underscores the complex nature of
his oeuvre.

As Zen-like as these works are, the Oriental quality of Fluxus becomes most pronounced in
the work of the Japanese Fluxus artists. Mieko Shiomi's Fluxversion of Event for the Late Aftemoon
(1963) is exemplary: "Violin is suspended with rope or ribbon inserted through pulley at top and
secured to floor. Performer in samurai armor positions himself under suspended violin, draws his
sword and cuts the rope in front of him, releasing the violin, which falls onto his helmeted head."

Similarly oriented toward samurai culture is Ay-O's wellknown mid-1960s Paper Event, once
performed at Carnegie Recital Hall. In this piece, a frame of crossed wooden strips in a latticelike
arrangement is built on stage. Various objects are attached to the frame at different points,
including, but not limited to, wood,
metal, musical sounding blocks, glass sheets, and more. A paper screen is stretched across the
stage. The performer must be a skilled archer. The archer is broueht into the theatre never
having seen the positioning of the objects. Standing at the back of the theatre, the performer
shoots arrows through the paper screen, where arrows hit or miss objects at random. The
sounding aspect of the concert takes place when the arrows strike the objects attached to the
frame.

Austere, ritual, but warm in its overtones. the work of Alison Knowles includes pieces that are
subtle but dazzling in their witty charm. Her Shuffle (1961), for example, is an early postmodern
soft-shoe first performed in 1963 at the National Association of Chemists and Perfumers
convention in New York: "The performer or performers shuffie into the performance area and
away from it, above, behind, around or through the audience. They perform as a group or solo,
but quietly."

Her performances are often food for more than thought, as was Proposition (1962) at
London's Institute for Contemporary Art: "Make a salad." During an active career of performance
work now spanning over a quarter of a century, Knowles has moved more and more toward the
silent, the liminal, and the meditative, frequently engaging viewers in meditation through group
activity and quiet communal eating.

If the "sane Zen" of Japanese Fluxus artists and Alison Knowles represents one pole of the
Orient, Nam June Paik's "crazy Zen" represents the other. Long acclaimed as the George
Washington of video art, he has had an active career moving from music to robotics to
cybernetics and electronic media. Paik has been keenly prophetic of a future he himself has
helped to shape. His predictions have come true in some cases earlier than even he expected. For
example, Paik's Utopian Laser TV Station (1965) first became
visible in the 1970s through cable and direct satellite rather than in the mid-1990s as he had
originally suggested. (On the lighter side, his Young Penis Sinfonie, a robust piece of erotic pseudo-
music, was premiered in 1975 rather than in 1984 as anticipated.)

Paik's video tapes include the world-famous Clobal Groooe (1973) and his recent Guadalcanal
Requiem (1976). He has a talent for conducting himself with highly personal directness while
presenting his ideas with engaging charm and lucidity. As a result, he can work well with an
extraordinary range of people, from officers of the Rockefeller Foundation and Sony to artists
such as Ray Johnson and Kit Fitzgerald.

Paiks performances are interactive. He often engages the audience, as in his famous tie-
cutting incident in homage to John Cage (and to John Cages tie). His workand statements
often comment directly on the Zeitgeist, on the moment in culture and on the moment in his
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life. His Tribute to Andy Mannik at The Kitchen (1981) in New York focused on a telephone call
to Woody and Steina Vasulka, and on Paiks lifelong ambition to play bad piano in a honky-tonk
strip joint. The piece was not simply a Paik invention, however, but a sensitive collaboration with
Andy Mannik (whose Tribute to Nam June Paik took place on the same program) and with
dancer Denise Gordon. Paiks work involves the collaborative sensibility of the Fluxus spirit, his
frequent and best known collaboration being that with cellist Charlotte Moorman (also a long-
time Fluxus fellow-traveler).

If Paik represents a free-associating Eastern sensibility, the prolific Dick Higgins holds a
comparable position with a Western approach. Higgins's work is protean, a series of experiments
first outlined
in his projects of the 1960s. Highly musical in source, Higgins's Constellations for Theater
presents typical performance possibilities, in which different numbers of performers and
instruments create sound according to varying structures. Two of the works give an idea:

viiNew Constellations (Constellation #7).
Any number of performers agree on a sound, preferably vocal, which they will
produce. When they are ready to begin to perform, they all produce the sound
simultaneously, rapidly and efficiently, so that the composition lasts as short a time as
possible. (Boulder, Colorado, October 1960)

viii(from) Two Contributions I (Contribution #I).
The performers elect a leader. Each performer selects a sound to produce which in
some way contributes to the environment of the performance, but which neither opposes
nor is directly derived from it. At a signal from the leader each performer produces his
sound as efficiently as possible. When each performer has produced his sound the piece is
over. (1959-1961)

Higgins presents the musicality inherent in Fluxus, as well as the temperance inherent in the
ability to appreciate nonsound, which can be traced back to John Cage. This sense of silence is
particularly
evident in

xA Winter Carol (Contribution #6).
Any number of people may perform this composition. They do so by agreeing in
advance on a duration for the composition, then by going out to listen in the falling snow.
(1961)

Czech Fluxus artist Milan Knizak may be closest to Higgins as a creator of performances. Both
in his variety, his fluency, and his ability to transcend media (participating with equal vigor in
events, music, visual art, andas an acknowledged co-founderHappenings, all roles he shares
with Higgins), Knizak has been one of Eastern Europe's major international influences, ranking
with such figures as Jiri Kolar. Knizak has influenced younger generations of Eastern European
artists including J. H. Kocman, Jiri Valoch (Czechoslovakia), Endre Tot, Tamas Szentjauby
(Hungary), Janusz Haka, and Jaroslaw Kozlowsky (Poland). Knizak's influence, however,
extended far beyond the boundaries of the Eastern European art community. He was discussed
extensively in Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, Allan Kaprow's seminal book on
Happenings and performance art forms, as one of the key figures in the development of the field.
Since 1966, when the book appeared, Knizak's influence and reputation have waxed and waned
by turns, his status often has been determined by the seclusion into which he has occasionally
been forced because of his political and artistic beliefs. Knizak is much represented and loved by
those who appreciate his robust events, pieces in which a zany spiritual emphasis on what might
be called Euro-Zen combines with a Rabelaisian delight in the pleasures of the flesh.

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Three of Knizak's Confrontation Events of 1964 and 1965 summarize his style.

Confrontation No. 1.
Each participant wearing a paper cap tries to knock off with wood or toy sword the cap
of another while defending himself with own sword against the same attempts of
opponents.

Confrontation No. 2.
Take a train ride without buying a ticket.

Confrontation No. 3.
Keep silent all day long.

Knizak's American stay in the late 1960s brought his ideas andhighly physical mode of
presentation to North American audiences. His trips to California were spectacular for those who
were present at the confrontations surrounding his Way of Fire; the evening of silent meditation at
de Benneville Pines, the Unitarian Universalist conference center in the mountains outside Los
Angeles that later hosted several series of avant-garde and contemporary art and music
conferences and exhibitions; the morning snow walk following his nightlong meditation in the
mountains; and, most memorable, in the spring 1969 series of actions, Knizak's successful attempt
to drink a roomful of Los Angeles hipsters under the table in a nightlong round of festivities that
grew to Hemingwayan proportions as artists and musicians followed one another asainst Knizak
in a dramatic drinking context.

Joseph Beuys is tough and gritty enough to rival Knizak, but oriented in a very different
direction. Beuys's work is well enough known that it does not require description or illustration.
The sensibility that he espousess tandsa s artistic parent to much work in the areas of Arte Povera,
process, and performance art. It is as profoundly humanitarian and spiritual as Knizak's. In style
and tone Beuys is somber, yet charismatic in his rich sobriety. His work can be warm, but it stands
in definite contrast to the passionately exuberant actions of Knizak. Were one to define a triad
among three clearly spiritual Fluxus artists, Beuys, Paik, and Knizak, one could say that Paik and
Beuys share the ethereal yet earthy qualities of Zen-oriented Fluxus, Paik and Knizak share the
Rabelaisian, and Knizak and Beuys share the gutsy, Pan-Eurasian folk culture with its magical and
often mythical ethos.

Much Fluxus work is vaudevillian, particularly in artists such as Ben Vautier and George
Maciunas. Maciunas's hundreds of jokelike projects ranged from training a dog to answer
commands by undertaking
the direct opposite action of the words spoken to the famous "Door of Knives" that effectively
disinvited all but the most stalwart visitor to his "basement loft" in SoHo. He was the Spike Jones
of contemporary art. (Curiously, Maciunas's favorite composers were Spike Jones and Claudio
Monteverdi.)

Vautier, brash, ribald, and egocentric, goes beyond Spike Jones in his energetic zest and in his
blunt execution of Fluxus projects. Other artists love him and hate him by turns. For over two and
a half decades, he has created art and blasphemed against art from his center in Nice, France. It
may be worth nothing that Mario Diacono, the Italian critic and art historian, believes that
Vautierwho prefers to call himself Benwas an influence on such major figures as Piero
Manzoni and Yves Klein.

lllA Personal Account

My friend and colleague Peter Frank noted in an essay on my work that

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The humanistic grounding to the proposal piece genre is more apparent in the work
of certain proposers than in the work of others. It is safe to say, however, that no proposer
seeks to make that grounding more overtly manifest than does Friedman. As other
commentators have observed, Friedman's proposals seem often to engage individuals in
interfunctions with other individualsand those that engage individuals instead with
objects do so in search not so much of the graceful formal gesture as of contemplative
unity with the world. (Ken Friedman: Events [New York: Institute for Art and Urban
Resources, 1980])

I enjoy interaction with others and with their work. This has been the focus of my named
pieces and homages. One example is Homage to Christo (1968): "something is unwrapped." It was
first performed at St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, during a conference. The
opportunity later came to unwrap Christo's own Wrapped Auditorium during a 1981 exhibition at
P.S. 1 in New York, when his showand my showboth ended there on the same day.

Contemplation and unity take many forms. Fluxus events create a theatre of the object:
objects take on a characteristic life, drawing performer and audience into the world. The many
versions of Fruit in Three Acts (1963-1967) explore this process:

Fruit in Three Acts.
Act l: Peach.
Act 2: Watermelon.
Act 3: Pear.

My events emerge from the process of reflection and involvement with others and with the
world. I came to join Fluxus not because I had intended to become an artist (I hadn't), but
because some of the artists in Fluxus saw in what I was doing a sensibility akin to their own.

What I had been doing up to that time were "events," that is, physical events or actions in time
and space. I had not done them as an artist, which I was yet to become, but as a response to ideas
and situations. The ability to respond to artistic reason (and unreason) makes us and our art what
we are. A decade of "events" emerging from my life activity preceded my participation in Fluxus,
starting when I was quite young. The earliest of them speaks, in a way, for the sensibility which
appears in all of them.

Scrub Piece.
One the first day of Spring, go unannounced to a public monument. Clean it
thoroughly. (First performed at the Nathan Hale Monument, New London, Connecticut,
spring 1956.)

lVA Provisional Conclusion

Fluxus has managed to succeed, to survive, and to influence others because of its light touch,
its responsiveness and its sense of scale. Time and change are basic to Fluxus, giving it liveliness
and durability. Thatand a profound sense of adventuremay account for a phenomenon
which has grown and changed through over two decades in an art world which usually measures
time in months and
seasonsonly rarely in years. Response is the heart of the matter.

ROSELEE GOLDBERG

The Golden Years

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In the following essay, RoseLee Goldberg looks back on the 1970s as the Golden Years of
Performance, as a period when the medium grew from an array of eccentric gestures aimed at
unsettling the art establishment to a fully accepted art form. Her overview spans the years 1968 to
the present, from a New York perspective, and identifies initial attitudes, the courses they took, and
where performance is now. She does not, however, attempt to cover every aspect of performance in the
1970s or the work of every artist, but to introduce and discuss this recent period of performance art
and some of its practitioners.

In the course of her survey, Goldberg cites artists such as Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, and Robert
Longo, and dancers such as Karole Armitage and Molissa Fenley, whose work in the latter half of the
decade contributed to performances increasing popularity and access to popular culture and its
ability to convey the energy and intensity of the time.

Concluding with some thoughts on the return to painting and performance arts loss of
fashionable status, she claims that there is a built-in cyclical aspect to performance history.
Throughout the twentieth century it has come and gone in waves, appearing as an irritant and a
catalyst when any one prevailing style or art form becomes entrenched, and she predicts that
performance will again rear its head and provide the shake-up that it customarily does.

RoseLee Goldberg is author of Performance: Live Art from 1909 to the Present (1979) and
has been actively involved in performance art in the United States and England.

The 1970s may well be looked on in time to come as the Golden Years of Performance. It was
a period when the medium grew from an array of eccentric gesturesvariously called body art or
living art or art aktuellaimed at unsettling the art establishment to a fully accepted art form with
its own written history, magazines, and critics. Performance feat ured as a large part of the oeuvre
of many artists and correspondingly became the focus of numerous festivals and conferences.
From street performances and private studio events witnessed only by peers of the artists to art
spaces specifically dedicated to showcasing the medium, performance gradually became a highly
popular and even fashionable genre. Most important, it also became a major influence on 1970s
art in general.

It has covered an area so broad and varied that it provides a fascinating yardstick to changing
sensibilities and attitudes in the 1970s, attitudes that ran the gamut from strictly noncommercial,
even alienating, activities to work that made decisive inroads into the popular media and clubs,
venturing into far larger establishments than the art world's, such as the record or video
industries. Or such has been the case in New York City, the principal subject of this study.

Such scrutiny of recent history becomes possible right now, in 1982, as performance takes a
more steady course, relinquishing its fashionable status to a renewed interest in painting.
Performance is not the hot item that it was in the late 1970s, mainly because its very high points
have provided the route into the present media-oriented aesthetic that dominates the new
generation of artists making paintings, drawings, or photographs. These artists have, as it were,
graduated from the performance context that was the setting for their formative years, when it
was simply uninteresting to paint, and even more uninteresting to associate with painters.
However, this is not to say that performance will be dormant. On
the contrary, the 1970s produced artists who worked almost exclusively in the medium. It has
produced a network of established venues, subsidized (until recently) by federal grants and
attended by a regular audience. These venues have in turn become the generating force behind
the medium; they guarantee that performance will continue to be produced, albeit to fit the
particular scheme of the venue and the interests of its audience.

This plateau of stability marks a particularly interesting moment in performance history; it
points to the fact that a major performance period has reached full circle, the circle here being
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somewhat schematically that which began in the late 1960s with performance as an irritant, a
provocative weapon used to unseat a complacent public and its view of the value of art, to the
present time when it has become an established and acceptable medium in its own right. From
body art, which was a means to break the impasse reached by Minimal art and its overwhelming
"objecthood," through the early 1970s when performance became an important means to
illustrate the cerebral and oftentimes ironic gestures of Conceptual art.

A turning point came around 1976, by which time the first generation of this "performance
cycle"Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, and Bruce Nauman, to name only a few of the artists
had ceased performing, only to create environments that suggested their presence, surrogate
"performances" that included recorded voices or puppets or video as devices to "activate" a space
and so interact with the viewer. At this point a second generation overlapped the first, an unusual
phenomenon within such a short time span. This second generationLaurie Anderson, Julia
Heyward, Michael Smith, Martha Wilson, Adrian Piper, Michael McClard, Robert Longo, among
many otherswere in turn the students of the Conceptual artists, a sophisticated and articulate
group who were not so much concerned with dismantling the previous generation's attitudes, as
with absorbing and embellishing them. While taking for granted a certain intellectual
rigorousness they dared to add the ingredient of pleasure that strict Conceptual art had denied.
Just as their mentors indulged in personal histories, sentimentality, and "everyday life" so did the
younger generation of performers. But unlike the older generation they added narrative and
sequential presentations that separated them from the somber and cerebral, erudite
demonstrations of the Conceptualists. As a result, these performances began to resemble more
traditional performance modesbe it variety theatre, cabaret, or stand-up comedyand marked
a shift to "performance as performance," rather than "performance as documentation," which
had largely been the case with the earlier works. This more recognizable format pointed, in
addition, to a different relationship with the audience, one that actually verged on audience
gratificationon entertainmentrather than the intentionally oblique and disturbing actions of
an Acconci or an Oppenheim.

This new generation took the conceptual premises for granted, extending them at the same
time, but the unavoidable "generation gap" accounted for further differences. The former were
the political activists of the 1960s, the generation that escaped the American 1950s. The latter
were the first television generation, albeit the not so nave witnesses to 1960s protest. So whereas
the Conceptual artists could be said to have been searching for an existential essence through
their work, the "media artists" received it all as so much recycled imagerythe post-Warhol
children, the children of distance and dissimulation.

The work of these artists, still in their twenties, tested the double edges of fine art and
popular entertainment, autobiography and fantasy, art and illusionissues that orthodox
Conceptualism bypassed in favor of philosophical rhetoricand in so doing relaxed a mood and
attracted larger audiences to work that was far easier to comprehend. Theoretical propositions
were dropped in favor of recomposing media ingredients to satisfy the cultural diet of these 1950s
babies. At the same time punk music filtered in from England, appearing in New York clubs in far
more sophisticated form, given that it was young educated artistswith their special privileges, as
opposed to the genuinely hurting and deprived working class of Britainwho assimilated its
liberating efiects, attracting the art crowd to CBGB's or The Mudd Club, The Ocean Clubor
Hurrah's, to watch this rock-and-roll renaissance.

By 1978/79, the high period for New York's new wave clubs, performance crossed easily from
the art world and venues such as The Kitchen Center and Franklin Furnace or Artists' Space to
rock clubs and back again. The groups that played both sidesThe Erasers, DNA, Theoretical
Girls, and many otherswere made up of artists who could not bear to be walled into the
somewhat precious world of art, yet who wanted to find the means to include their own rock-and-
roll backgrounds, their own new wave culture in their art, without relinquishing their desires to
$'
be part of both worlds. This was the time that performance could be tested in the "real world"
with a more general public as had historically been its intention.

To graduate from the art world into real life into television or into video discs, into feeding
the industries that in turn feed the art and allow artists to live on revenue from their own work
had been the goal of many young artists now performing in the early 1980s. Questions have been
raised about the feasibility of playing both sides, about what compromises must be made to "sell
out" in terms of audience before selling out in terms of content and artistic integrity. Needless to
say, the two factions, popular and high art, had been eyeing one another across a fragile divide
for some time, with a fairly simple rationale to justify the merger: something so omnipresent as
the media must be utilized and adapted, infiltrated and altered, for to avoid it was tantamount to
living in the past, in a sentimental land of pastures and idyllic picnics along quietly flowing
streams. Even so, there would be those few who could actually make the crossover.

How different the situation is now from then, the late 1960s, how different now to read an
article on Vito Acconci from 1973 that queries how such "body art" can be sold, when today the
new young painters have waiting lists for their works, which daily are endorsed by critics quoting
the latest prices like the call of a bullish stock market. How different now the role of the artist and
critic, now from then in the late 1960s, when many artists, responding to the barricades in Paris
streets and the protests on American campuses, metaphorically erected their own barricades,
calling for an art of ideas and an art that would short-circuit the consumer market, an art that
would find for itself a philosophical base, almost a moral code for existing, and an art that spoke
for itselfthrough the intelligence of the artists themselvesnot through the mouthpieces of
critics.

Such were the opening years of the 1970s, truly begun in 1968, a preface as it were to the new
morality. The gesture, the event, was what characterized the one-off performances that were often
as brutish and painful as the protests taking place across the country. Vito Acconci's work of this
time captured that sensibility: Claim (1971) had him in a basement, wielding a lethal iron pole,
blindfolded, and beating at the air; Follwing Piece (1969) had him trailing a randomly selected
person in the street, taking in the person's
route and activities, ending up on one occasion in a movie house; and, Conversions (1970) had
him burning the hairs off his chest and hiding his penis between his legs in a futile attempt to
understand himself without these masculine characteristics.

Each experiment absorbed him and the audience in a self-analysis of difficult proportions, an
analysis that he equated in retrospect to being "like a child a kind of child growing up." First
the realization of existence, simply "being in the world"; hence the simple illustrative experiments
with presence such as those described above. Then the realization of there "being another
person"an "other"illustrated by works such as Seedbed (1972), with Acconci masturbating
under a ramp in a gallery, acting out his fantasies to the beat of anonymous footsteps; to the
power of "things" as in Remote Control (1974), a play between male and female on video monitors,
in which the action is ordered and acted out over screens; to withdrawing from performance
altogether in Command Performance (1974), a video installation that was the grand finale to this
early repertoire.

Such demonstrations were part of a generally didactic and investigatory mood, one that
sought to explore the notions of "being an artist" as well as the motives and emotions for "making
art." This attitude opened the doors to any kind of experimentation, providing an open charter
in terms of method or materials. It led to works such as Reading Position for a Second-Degree Burn
(1970) that Dennis Oppenheim undertook at Long Beach, California. Comprising the simple act
of lying in the sun for a three-hour period, with an appropriately titled book on his chest,
Oppenheim "painted" his body with sunburn, the section where the book was placed retaining
$(
the pink skin tones of an academic. Another such "sensation-oriented" work was Lead Sink for
Sebastian (1970), in which the "act of sculpting" was felt by Sebastian, a one-legged
man whose especially designed iron leg was melted down by Oppenheim. Bruce Nauman
made performances in which he measured out the edges of a square or curled into the corners of
a room, each time delineating the spatial properties of place that a sculptor might consider, while
Klaus Rinke and Monika Baumgartl made more formalistic demonstrations of similar
considerations, producing
emblematic images of contemporary male/female figures.

The simplicity and purity of these actions were in direct response to the rigorous analysis that
these artists were making of the art process, the mechanics of the art world, and the very
existential base of being an artist. Such scrutiny did not allow for instant acceptance or easy
readability, yet at the same time the workbeing "live" and decidedly eccentrichad a small
public following and some notoriety. Above all it raised questions, disturbed the critics and public
alike, and allowed for few pat answers. It was intentionally "difficult" in that an underlying
premise was to avoid the comfortability that painting or sculpture might induce. Moreover, its
ephemerality, its very intangibility pointed always to a philosophy of art, a theoretical position vis-
-vis the culture, which in turn created a critique of criticism and a review of the traditional
notion of the artist as a sensitive but inarticulate creature.

At the same time those that chose to work in performance maintained a doggedly
antimaterialist stance, suggesting that an art that could not be bought and sold would of necessity
retain its original purity, that is, always be responsible for raising polemical questions. The
resulting aesthetic was a particularly clean-cut one, pared of all "decoration," one that insisted
that "the elegance of an idea" was more important than its execution. While posing critical
problems about the success or failure of such intangible "beauty,"
the discourse that this provoked was considered to be preferable to comfortable "armchair
art."

Coinciding with this moral code was an even more angst-ridden position that was taken by a
group of artists for whom such analysis resulted in extremely unsettling work. Demonstrating
danger and pain, sacrifice and madness in their most realistic terms, each of these artists
responded to very particular cultural triggers. In California, Chris Burden's dramatic stagingsas
a student he squeezed himself into a school locker where he remained for five days, or, later, was
crucified to a Volkswagen, or shot in the arm by a marksmanrebuked a society indifferent to
violence and made catatonic by television and movie killings at all times of the day and night. In
Paris, Gina Pane climbed ladders of broken glass or lay millimeters above burning candles, in
painful experiments that seemed linked to an equally anesthetized society, recovering from the
political upheaval of May 1968. In Austria, Hermann Nitsch promised to bring Western man
closer to his primitive origins with orgies of cow's blood and entrails, processions and theatrical
rituals that recalled a medieval passion play.

The genuine lack of interest in producing art objects continued to provide a breeding ground
for performance of all sorts. It would not be long before these same artists would have to submit
to the reality of the art marketplace, but in the meantime a generally curious and amenable
"scene" developed around these events. This in turn had a multiplying effect in that it
encouraged artists from other disciplines to use the performance setting and existent audience
for their own experimental work.

Thus the relationship among dancers, artists, musicians, and poets in the early 1970s was a
close one, sometimes involving direct collaboration, at others, complementary experiments
because performance provided a permissive umbrella for renegades from the more conservative
bastions of their chosen art. The Judson Church group for example saw young Merce
Cunningham dancers breaking away from the master to form their own eccentric company in a
$)
Washington Square church hall in New York City. There they developed a vocabulary of dance
and composition that insisted on the audience examining the matter of dancethe bodyand
its everyday movements, uncluttered by formalist jets or classically
bowed arms. This same group, including Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Steve
Paxton, and Lucinda Childs, would branch out to create very different dancer personalities that
echoed the conceptual work of the time. Patterns of movement, complex spatial tactics
performed by dancers less concerned with turnout than with conceptual strategies, such ideas
formed the basis for the new dance. Like the conceptual work that it paralleled, this dance was
pared down to "pure ideas," freed of costume, lighting, or decoration of any kind, with even the
traditional musical accompaniment being replaced by the sounds of feet stamping or hands
clapping, the movement of clothes loosely draped across bodies.

Lucinda Childs developed staccato movements that would transport the dancers from one
point to the next, each move having been carefully marked off beforehand in the form of
intricate notation. Trisha Brown, more playful and less purist in her approach, created early
works with gravity-defying dancers moving across walls, tied to the ceiling with mountaineering
equipment, or walking down the sheer face of buildings similarly suspended. Laura Dean's
dancers spun, dervish fashion, in and out of predetermined patterns while Deborah Hay created
participatory events in which the audience, like a gathering of flower chlldren, would become the
performance through following a series of motions indicated by a leader.

These events, which took place at the Judson Church or at 112 Greene Street or at the Mercer
Arts Center (later The Kitchen Center)-alternative spaces that opened at the beginning of the
1970screated a network of places that accumulated to make for an extraordinarily lively
performance world. The issues at hand were numerous and each was explored in unexpected
formats. The "live" work could have any dimension and any timingfrom brief one-minute works
to twenty-four-hour extravaganzasand could take place on the street or in a building, in the
newly opened warehouses of SoHo or in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. Its emphasis
could be poetry, music, dance, or film.

There were those less concerned with conceptual puritanism and philosophical signifiers who
interpreted this open situation by turning to their bodies in stylish ways, painting and
transforming them. Hence Gilbert and George, who added some much needed wit and romance
to the aesthetic of the London group that emerged from St. Martin's School of Art in the late
1960s. Meticulously dressed as middle-class Englishmen in neat suits that would become their
uniform in the following decade, the two dedicated
their lives to Art and all its Perils. Precious as Wedgewood china, faces and hands painted
gold, they presented their Singing Sculpture at New York's Sonnabend Gallery in 1972; a tape of
Underneath the
Arches played and replayed as Gilbert and George moved marionette fashion on top of a table.
In a different vein Urs Luthi or Castelli, both in Switzerland and in very different ways, made
tableaux of transvestite imagery, reflecting the fay glamour and chic rock-and-roll styling of the
Stones or Roxy Music or Lou Reed.

Costume and fabrication, the body as the best place to hang a work of art, took on yet other
forms in the displays of artists such as Colette, whose tableaux found her sunk into folds of fabric,
pastel colored from head to toe; while Pat Oleszko made costumes with multiple-choice arms or
legs, as in her Coat of Anns (twenty-six narms); Hannah Wilke brought body art down to basics by
appearing in various works bare breasted, usually accompanied by a particular subtitle that gave a
double-edge meaning to her nudity. Dr. Brus or Mr. Peanut in Canada created performance
persona that infiltrated the image banks of magazines, particularly that collected by File magazine,
the stylish LIFE-like publication of General
Idea in Toronto, whose efiective art direction spread the rumor of extraordinary
performances, many of which took place largely within the pages of the magazine.
%+

Even while new artists emerged on the performance scene at a steadily increasing rate, adding
their own idiosyncratic gestures to the broad vocabulary of the genre, they had to reckon with the
innovations of those who had for some time committed themselves to working "live." By 1975
Joan Jonas's body of performance work was extensive enough to provide its own mini history of
the changing preoccupations of the 1970s. Sculptor turned performer (after a period of working
with the Judson Dance Theatre in the late 1960s) Jonas's early work investigated "issues of space
ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out." First with mirrors, then
with video or film, indoors or out, Jonas used these devices to create spatial illusions, investing
them at the same time with curious personal symbols. Twilight (1975) comprised layers of space
activated through various stage levels, movie screen, and transparent scrim, as well as video
monitors, through which moved mysterious robed figures, white funnels to their lips. It would be
these Grimm's fairy-tale-like creatures that would lead the way to Jonas's later productions.

Richard Foreman, director and playwright, constructed a very particular layered space in his
Broadway loft for his Ontological Hysteric Theatre. But his figures were far from any fairy tales;
rather they were the product of a brain part structuralist, part Surrealist. The action was both
what was said (live) and what was about to be said (recorded, matter of fact) as well as what could
or should be said (recorded, argumentative), as if one had access to the mind of the "character"
and the "writer" and all his silent partnersphilosophers, semiologists, psychologists
simultaneously. The only performance work of the time to be profusely verbal, Foreman's
productions nevertheless drew attention to spaces and pictures, as defined by words and actions.

Robert Wilson, on the other hand, constructed spaces that became the underlying drama of
the work; visual landscapes powerfully determined the very presence of the performers, reducing
language to background murmurings. In productions such as A Letter to Queen Victmia (1974) or
Einstein on the Beach (1976) the sets gave stature and direction to each scene as they were
transformedfrom one potent visual image to the next. Unprecedented in scale and spectacle,
Wilson brought new life to the "total artwork," investing it not only with his own vivid imagery but
with the talents of some of the most interesting artists, musicians, and choreographers of the
time. This ability to orchestrate ideas and people, constructing extraordinary visual worlds from
their mix, reinforced and extended Wilson's sphere of influence; even while the many artists who
at one time or another had worked with Wilson departed to make their own very distinctive work,
they carried with them the spirit of his professionalism and rigorousness as well as the confidence
of his support.

By 1976 performance festivals were taking place at regular intervals throughout New York, as
well as in London, at Documenta in Kassel, and the Biennales in Venice and Sydney. There was
actually an air of excitement around these events, given that they provided the general public
with a milieu for meeting or seeing artists. This was a time, it should be remembered, when
painting was still of the more cerebral kind, beautiful stratified canvases by artists such as Bob
Ryman, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, or Cy Twombly, laden with paint or calligraphy, with a
quiet, intensive sensuality. But these were not the kind of paintings that made the general public
feel at ease, or feel included in any way in the life of the artists or the art scene. On the other
hand the nonstop performance festivities stirred the imagination of a public curious to view the
art world at closer quarters.

Despite New York's densely crowded cultural calendar performance events were heavily
attended. Nineteen seventy-six began with a major event at the Whitney Museum, Four Evenings,
Four Days, a performance series that announced the now fashionable medium to the New York
public at large. The program comprised a mix of newcomers to the city: Michael Smith with his
diapered Baby Icky; Adrian Piper with her go-go dancer; local downtown favorites such as Stuart
Sherman or Martha Wilsonl artists
%*
like Richard Foreman or Robert Wilson, who had already presented major performances in
the city; emerging performers who would give solid ground for performance's new popularity
such as Laurie Anderson or Julia Heyward. Audiences were attracted by the ever-changing
formats for performance: Grommets (a series arranged by Jean Dupuy in his Broadway loft)
provided peep-show conditions, viewing cubicles with one artist per canvas partition, while Scott
Burton's Pair Behavior Tableau at The Guggenheim Museum situated the viewers at a distance of
about a hundred feet. Line Up at The Museum of Modern Art turned the museum into a
fairground for performance with events taking place in the penthouse, the stairwell, and galleries.

This official acknowledgment of the genre had a twofold effect on the performance scene: on
the one hand it whetted the appetite of an audience that might normally not have become
involved, and on the other it spurred artists to find less sedate venues for a medium that had
traditionally been without traditionsthat had in fact been a means to bypass curatorial or
critical approval. By 1978 so-called alternative organizations such as The Kitchen Center or Artists
Space actually became the showcases for the more accomplished and experienced performersa
"safe" place with a steady and polite audience, as well as regular press coverage. On the other
hand the clubs such as The Mudd, TR 3, or Hurrah's provided a difficult proving ground for new
work, given the trials of attracting attention above the noise level of the music and the clinking of
beer bottles on a bar counter.

Both sides in their different ways had similar goals: to provide intelligent and provocative
entertainment. Both looked to the Dadaists' Cabaret Voltaire as a precedent for what could
ideally be achieved; an easy atmosphere where artists would present work to a nonexclusive
audience, without the aura that surrounded art events. This polarization of the genre into rock-
club entertainment on the one hand and "art" on the other allowed places like The Kitchen
Center to play a more didactic and critical role, situating
the work in a thematic or historical context. For the clubs, the artworld following gave
credibility to a business enterprise, but it also showed an increased readiness on the part of some
press and public to embrace the art worldeither because they found it glamorous or because
they genuinely looked to it for the unusual and interesting in a city already overburdened by the
"fascinating" as portrayed in the hype magazines and the sensational news programs.

The sheer density of performers, performance spaces, and audiences slowly created
qualitative measures for the work, but the rating system came to resemble more and more that
applied to traditional performance. This was as much the result of the maturation and
experience of certain artists as it was their looking to entertainers as models or the media as
potential vehicles for the work. Lorne Michaels's Saturday Night Live, wlth its audience of millions,
offered a tantalizing prospect for some artists and the SNL writers were not unaware of potential
raw material in the art world. But, although Michaels had a particular talent for constructing a
context for unusual work, particularly in the corporate situation of television, his followers, once
he left the show, were not as able or willing. Video and sometime performance artist Mitchell
Kriegman was brought in by the second generation of Saturday Night Live, but was dismissed
shortly thereafter. The work remained too idiosyncratic and personal for the television team,
despite some success with audiences. The Kipper Kids were also very briefly courted by the
popular media, appearing with their outrageously silly songs that bordered on the obscene at
rock concerts or, once, on network television. But while their bawdiness was just acceptable in the
art world, it was not so in the media world. Kriegman or the Kipper Kids aside, these unsuccessful
courtships further pointed to whether the machinations of the larger culture would actually
permit the inclusion of artwork. For while the media had been looking to performance and its
popularity at the clubs and to some artists' video, it was on their part a means to coopt a
fashionable trend rather than actually to provide a larger context for work that had entirely
different reference pointsin terms of both style and content.

***
%"

Despite these particular instances the goal of producing material that could appeal both to
the art intelligentsia and to the general public was an important one for many artists. As a
futuristic ideal it was democratic but it was also an inevitable fact of life in a media society; "the
public," narrow or broad, could be reached through the mediation of magazines, television, and
daily press; video discs would soon be available to every American home. At the same time these
young artists, who had grown up thoroughly accepting of that media world, would
understandably "speak its language." It was "only natural" that they seek access to the popular
culture. Indeed, one artist who has succeeded in escaping the art-world minority for the larger
culture while still maintaining artistic integrityLaurie Andersonin a recent performance wore
a T-shirt with the words Talk Normal written across it, even as she talked through electronic
modifiers that gave her voice the eerie sounds of computerized speech. For her, a normal
evening at home is sitting in the dark in her studio playing all her "tech" equipment. This to her
is everyday life.

So, too, are her performances. Everyday life in American culture is depicted in a four-part
opus United States (1978-1982) that was premiered as a whole in the fall of 1982. Presented
separately, each hour-and-a-half-long segment has dealt with particular themestransportation,
politics, sociopsychology, and moneyjuxtaposing images and text, sound and technological
inventions. Made up of a series of ironical "talking songs" interspersed with unusual visual
devicessuch as a slide show that magically appears
and disappears at the whisk of a violin bow in the air or red lips that hover in the darkthis
series has attracted an extraordinarily large audience. In concert, in a theatre, at clubs like the
Ritz, or solo on the road, the mix of smooth professional productions worthy of Broadway with
highly unusual content elicits powerful responses from increasingly large circles of followers,

Above all Anderson has a talent that prior to her performance work was once considered
irrelevant to art performance, and that is stage presence. A "natural," she also understands and
expertly applies the performer's power to seduce and control. Whereas in earlier works this
quality was disguised by a studied clumsiness, as a protective device against art-world criticism that
the work might be entertainingand therefore banalAnderson has taken a stand against that
argument, pointing out that "seriousness can also be a container for the banal." Anderson's work
proves that even while it is entertainingowing to humor, to language, to timing, style, and
presenceit is never banal. Rather the performances that verge on conventional stage shows,
with their synched lighting, musical cues, and three-minute segments, allow for the unusual
content to be transcribed to wider audiences than might normally consider such issues. For
Anderson, the mediaradio, television, even telephonesare simply vehicles for ideas and
inventions as well as a means to create a personal circuit outside of the gallery one, rather than
forms that must necessarily alter the substance of her thinking. And the very clarity of that
thinking, the precision with which she molds it to her distinctive style, is an additional
explanation of her very broad appeal.

Even so, the stage presence, the intricate play between words, song, and extraordinary
custom-made instruments that characterize her performances, could not explain the popularity
of her record "O Superman" that in 1981 reached Top of the Pops, the English rock-and-roll hit
parade. An eight-minute song without bass line or chorus, with a synthesized voice and
nonrepetitive lyrics, is not the thing of which a hit song is usually made. Rather, Anderson's hit
was a curious blend of haunting electronic sound and disturbing lyrics; a mixture that suggested
consumer aestheticsoppressive and anesthetizing but heroic at the same time. Its title, "O
Superman," which Anderson dedicated to Massenet, was, like his song that begins O Souverain,
an appeal for help. About the media culture that controls, it appeals to a generation exhausted by
its artifice.

%#
Also in 1981 Anderson signed a six-record contract with Warner Bros. (USA); for the record
company she remains an artist, an unusual and intriguing addition to their stable; for Anderson,
integrity intact, they provide her with the most professional means to produce her art. What
results from this merger will provide some interesting answers to the ongoing question of fine arts
and mass culture crossovers, and the art world will be keeping a crose watch on Anderson's
progress. In the meantime, Anderson is a model and an influence; directly or indirectly the
professionalism of her enterprise has encouraged a study of technique and performance
expertise, a trend that has been growing in a number of artists contemporary with Anderson. At
first glance this drift toward traditional variety theatre, cabaret, or even situation comedy would
seem a conservative one. yet a closer view reveals a subtle analysis of the media culture and of
performance as an efiective critical tool.

Eric Bogosian, a trained actor performing in the art context, looked to the tradition of solo
performerswhether Lenny Bruce or Brother Theodore, Laurie Anderson or Julia Heywardas
confirmation of his concern for presencethe actor's live presence being the energy and the
"humanity" of his work. Concerned first and foremost with content, Bogosian at the same time
emphasizes acting itself, "framing" the medium as it were by tightly constructing each piece in
terms of moves, lighting, and subtly mannered acting. The characters that people his one-person
shows are a gallery of contemporary types, and their appearance illustrates his virtuositv as well as
his acknowledgment of classical actor training techniques.
Such "acting in relief in images that are both two-dimensionalcarefully choreogaphed
against space and setand three-dimensional in their breadth of "personality" is as much the
result of Bogosian's own love of spectacle (his background was the rock concert, not Broadway) as
the result of his proximity to the art scene. Particularly, Bogosian was influenced by artists like
Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Zwack, some of whom had made
performances alongside work in other media and all of whom have appropriated aspects of mass
culture in their work. For these artists "growing up" meant being literate in movies and television,
not books. The economy of means used to create an image in the mediacutting and cropping,
editing and freeze-framingencouraged an equivalent sensibility in their art and performances.
Goldstein's The Fencers (1978) re-created the stop-and-start effects of an editing machine through
the use of pulsing white lights against fencing figures in an otherwise dark space, while Robert
Longo's Sound Distance of a Good Man (1978) presented a three-part "screen" of figures; two
wrestlers in one frame and an opera singer in another flanked a third that comprised a movie of a
photograph of a man's and a lion's head. Each performance was the work of an artist who
approached the material in much the same way as would a movie director, arriving at isolated and
flattened images that resembled movie stills, and with a sense of timing closer to a film loop than
to the "real time" of live actors on a stage.

The generation that emerged at the time of rock-and-roll's twenty-fifth anniversary and a
growing interest in movie history injected bits and pieces of rock nostalgia and Hollywood culture
into the art of the early 1980s. Translating this general sensibility, which could be seen in specific
downtown New york clubs from around 1978 where many artists were performing in their own
new wave bands, into dance was the surprise move of Cunningham-trained Karole Armitage. With
her perfectly tuned body, she teamed up with Rhys Chatham and his "out-of-tune guitars" to
create a dance piece that would stunningly capture the sensibility of the moment. Drastic
Classicism (1980)a collaboration including Charles Atlas who was responsible for the decor
magically combined all the ingredients of punk/new wave artifacts and energy: their glamour and
seediness; their sophistication and simulated dumbness; their sounds and movements; their
purples and blacks and splashes of phosphorescent colors. Within this tension there was the
balance of classical and anarchistic approaches to both dance and music. There was an evident
respect for classical modes expressed by both artists, yet every movement and each guitar chord
stretched those modes past the breaking point. Dancers and musicians met head-on in the same
performing space, one using the other as support and antagonist in a dialectical tryst. While the
musicians held their ground, beating out a wall of sound, the dancers attempted to shove the
%$
musicians aside, forced by these physical barriers to create "louder" movements as the intensity of
the music increased.

Another dancer who made an important break away from so-called postmodern dance, which
had held sway for a good decade with its minimal aesthetics and overall conceptual sensibility, was
Molissa Fenley. Like Armitage she was fired by the intensity and energy of the performance scene
in the late 1970s, the mood that provided the starting point for many of the more visible young
artists today. With the barest of external references Fenley managed to suggest the dynamics
underlying the nervous energy of the time. Inventing movements that each contained the making
of the next series of gestures, Fenley created a mesmerizing and stimulating work called Energizer
(1981), which as its title suggests left audience and dancer hyperventilated at its conclusion.

Despite New York's ability to regenerate itself continuously, the particular intensity that
characterized the clubs and the emerging new scene in various media from 1978 through this
four-year period had inevitably to play itself out. Many of the artists who had made
performancesJack Goldstein, Michael McClard, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, or Robin
Winters, to name a fewnow make paintings, sculptures, or photographs. They have settled into
more contemplative (and profitable) forms of expression, returning to what the world at large
considers to be mainstream art. At the same time their work contains many media references,
styles, and techniques and is far more popular in its approach, partly as a result of the artists'
proximity to performance.

This "return to paintingto more accessible art, after well over a decade of perplexing
conceptual materialrelieves performance of its fashionable status. This in turn will probably
allow those committed to the live medium to develop in a iess frenetic atmosphere, consolidating
ideas and motifs without the pressure or influence of prevailing trends. performers of the caliber
of Laurie Anderson will no doubt continue to walk the fine line of art and mass culture, keeping
the notion of performance in the public eye; Eric Bogosian can more carefully develop a
repertoire of men and manners' allowing each to evolve from a much larger frame of reference
than the performance scene itself; and younger performers such as Tim Miller or those testing
their skills at P.S. 122 or Inroads will have to work with the more sophisticated elements of
performancepresence, structure, and spectaclethat the 1970s have consolidated. More than
likely these artists will continue to move in the direction of the mediatelevision, video discs,
cableboth because of their obvious potential as a way of reaching large audiences, and because
they hold the possibility of financial reward in this not-for-profit medium.

But above all history will provide its own regenerating force for performance. Even while it
continues to be accepted as"a medium in its own right, there is a built-in cyclical aspect to
performance history. Throughout the twentieth century it has come and gone in waves,
appearing as an irritant and a catalyst when any one prevailing style or art form becomes
entrenched. It has been used by young artists determined to attract public attention outside of
the decorum of gallery and critics, and as such has often represented the highly experimental
aspects of emerging artists, work. Such was the case with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the
Surrealists, or more recently with Happenings in the challenge to color-field
painting, and body art in its relation to Minimalism. Each time performance is the escape
hatch from the art establishment that the new generation of artists needs. yet each time that it
returns, performance looks entirely different, even unrecognizable, from the time before. It will
be different the next time around. because it will be responding to an entirely new set of cultural
and artistic concerns and because no matter how accepted, the definition of performance
remains open-ended. Right now, in 1982, performance may be less in the spotlight than the new
painting," less a focus of magazines or festivals than it was in the late 1970s. An era has begun that
will bear witness to the establishment of the new
%%
painting styles and their accompanying criticism, but then when the market backing this
generation begins to create an impasse for effective work, performance will again rear its head
and provide the shake-up that it customarily does.
%&

Part 2: Theory and Criticism

Michael Kirby

On Acting and Non-Acting

Performance art, which is closely linked to such earlier art forms as the Happening and
environmental performances, borrows elements from these as well as from traditional theatrical
forms. Thus acting is an important element of performance art, although it sometimes is important
only because the artist attempts to minimize its role.

Michael Kirby recognizes that some performances do not involve acting. Nevertheless, other
elements carry the meaning in place of acting. Kirby sees acting from these other viewpoints, which he
identifies as nonmatrixed performing nonmatrixed representation, received acting, simple acting, and
complex acting. In this essay he creates a scale, with examples, that measures the amount or degree of
representation, simulation, impersonation, and so forth in performance behavior.

Michael Kirby writes and directs his plays off-off-Broadway with the Structuralist Workshop; his
most recent productions have been Photoanalysis, Double Gothis, Incidents in Renaissance
Venice, The Alchemical Caligari, and Prisoners of the Invisible Kingdom. He is the author of
Happenings, the Art of Time, and Futurist Performance and is the editor of The Drama
Review. He is professor in the graduate department of Performance Studies at the New York
University Tisch School of the Arts.

In his conclusion to this essay Kirby notes that his acting/not-acting scale should not be used to
establish values of any kind. Objectively, all points on the scale are equally good. It is only personal
taste that prefers complex acting to simple acting or nonmatrixed performing to acting. The various
degrees of representation and personification are colors, so to speak, in the spectrum of human
performance; the artist may use whichever colors he prefers.

Acting means to feign, to simulate, to represent, to impersonate. As Happenings
demonstrated, not all performing is acting. Although acting was sometimes used, the performers
in Happenings generally tended to "be" nobody or nothing other than themselves; neither did
they represent, or pretend to be in, a time or place different from that of the spectator. They
walked, ran, said words, sang, washed dishes, swept, operated machines and stage devices, and so
forth, but they did not feign or impersonate.

In most cases acting and not-acting are relatively easy to recognize and identify. In a
performance we usually know when a person is acting and when he is not. But there is a scale or
continuum of behavior involved, and the differences between acting and not-acting may be quite
small. In such cases categorization may not be easy. Perhaps some would say it is unimportant,
but, in fact, it is precisely these borderline cases that can provide insights into acting theory and
into the nature of the art.

Let us examine acting by tracing the acting/not-acting continuum from one extreme to the
other. We shall begin at the notacting end of the scale, where the performer does nothing to
feign, simulate, impersonate, and so forth, and move to the opposite position, where behavior of
the type that defines acting appears in
abundance. Of course, when we speak of "acting" we are referring not to any one style but to
all styles. We are not concerned, for example, with the degree of "reality" but with what we can
call, for now, the amount of acting.

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NOT-ACTING
ACTING

There are numerous performances that do not use acting. Many, but by no means all, dance
pieces would fit into this category. Several Far Eastern theatres make use of stage attendants such
as the kurombo and koken of Kabuki. These attendants move props into position and remove them,
help with onstage costume changes, and even serve tea to the actors. Their dress distinguishes
them from the actors, and they are not included in the informational structure of the narrative.
Even if the spectator ignores them as people, however, they are not invisible. They do not act, and
yet they are part of the visual presentation.

As we shall see when we get to that point on the continuum, "acting" is activeit refers to the
feigning, simulation, and so forth that is done by a performer. But representation, simulation, and
other of the qualities that define acting may also be applied to the performer. The way in which a
costume creates a "character" is one example of this.

Let us forsake performance for a moment and consider how the "costume continuum"
functions in daily life. If a person wears cowboy boots on the street, as many people do, we do not
identify him as a cowboy. If he also wears a wide, tooled-leather belt and even a Western hat, we
do not see this as a costumeeven in a northern city. It is merely a choice of clothing. As more
and more items of Western clothinga bandana, chaps, spurs, and so forthare added,
however, we reach the point where we see either a cowboy or a person dressed as
(impersonating) a cowboy. The exact point on the continuum at which this kind of specific
identification occurs depends on several factors, the most important of which is place or physical
context, and it undoubtedly varies quite a bit from person to person.

The effect of clothing on stage functions in exactly the same way, but it is more pronounced.
A performer wearing only black leotards and Western boots might easily be identified as a
"cowboy." This, of course, indicates the symbolic power of costume in performance. It is
important, however, to notice the degree to
which the external symbolization is supported and reinforced (or contradicted) by the
performer's behavior. If the performer moves (acts) like a cowboy, the identification is made
much more readily. If he is merely himself, the identification might not be made at all.

At this stage on our acting,/not-acting continuum we are concerned with those performers
who do not do anything to reinforce the information or identification. When the performer, like
the stage attendants of Kabuki and No, is merely himself and is not embedded, as it were, in
matrices of pretended or represented character, situation, place, and time, I refer to him as being
nonmatrixed.As we move toward acting from this extreme not-acting position on our continuum,
we come to that condition in which the
performer does not act and yet his costume represents something or someone. We could call
this state nonmatrixed representation or nonmatrixed symbolization.

NOT-ACTING
ACTING
NONMATRIXED NONMATRIXED
PERFORMING REPRESENTATION

In Oedipus, a New Work, by John Perreault, the "main performer," as Perreault refers to him
rather than calling him an actor, limps. If we are aware of the title of the piece and of the story of
Oedipus, we might assume that this performer represents Oedipus. He does not pretend to limp,
however. A stick has been tied "to his right leg underneath his pants in such a way that he will be
forced to limp." When the main performer operates a tape recorder, as he does frequently during
the presentation, we do not think that this is a representation of Oedipus running a machine. It is
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a nonmatrixed performer doing something. The lighting of incense and the casting of a reading
from the I Ching can be seen as a reference to the Delphic oracle; the three lines of tape that the
main performer places on the floor so that they converge in the center of the area can be seen as
representing the place where, at the intersection of three roads, Oedipus killed his father, and
the limp (and the sunglasses that the main performer wears throughout the piece) can be
considered to stand for aspects of Oedipus. The performer, however, never behaves as if he were
anyone other than himself. He never represents elements of character. He merely carries out
certain actions.

In nonmatrixed representation the referential elements are applied to the performer and are
not acted by him. And just as Western boots do not necessarily establish "a cowboy," a limp may
convey information without establishing a performer as "Oedipus." When, as in Oedipus, a New
Work, the character and place matrices are weak, intermittent, or nonexistent, we see a person,
not an actor. As "received" references increase, however, it is difficult to say that the performer is
not acting even though he is doing nothing that we could define as actins. In a New York
luncheonette before Christmas we might see "a man in a Santa Claus suit" drinking coffee; if
exactly the same action were carried out on stage in a setting representing a rustic interior, we
might see "Santa Claus drinking coffee in his home at the North Pole." When the matrices are
strong, persistent, and reinforce each other, we see an actor, no matter how ordinary the
behavior. This condition, the next step closer to true acting on our continuum, we may refer to as
received acting.

NOT-ACTING
ACTING
NONMATRIXED NONMATRIXED RECEIVED
PERFORMING REPRESENTATION ACTING

Extras, who do nothing but walk and stand in costume, are seen as "actors." Anyone merely
walking across a stage containing a realistic setting might come to represent a person in that
placeand, perhaps, timewithout doing anything we can distinguish as acting. There is the
story of the critic who headed backstage to congratulate a friend and could be seen by the
audience as he passed outside the windows of the onstage house; it was an opportune moment in
the story, however, and he was accepted as part of the play.

Neither does the behavior in received acting necessarily need to be simple. Some time ago I
remember reading about a play in which John GarfieldI am fairly sure it was he, although I no
longer know the title of the playwas an extra. During each performance he played cards and
gambled with several friends onstage. They really played, and the article emphasized how much
money someone had won (or lost). At any rate, as my memory is incomplete, let us imagine a
setting representing a bar. In one of the upstage booths, several men play cards throughout the
act. Let us say that none of them has lines in the play; they do not react in any way to the
characters in the story we are observing. These men do not act. They merely play cards. And yet
we also see them as characters, however minor, in the story and we say that they, too, are acting.
We do not distinguish them from the other actors.

If, as I should like to do, we define acting as something that is done by a performer rather
than something that is done for or tohim, we have not yet arrived at true acting on our scale.
"Received actor" is only an honorary title, so to speak. Although the performer seems to be
acting, he actually is not. Nonmatrixed performing, nonmatrixed representation, and received
acting are stages on the continuum that move from not-acting to acting. The amount of
simulation, representation, impersonation, and so forth has increased as we have moved along
the scale, but, so far, none of this was created by the performer in a special way we could
designate as acting.

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Whereas acting in its most complete form ofiers no problem of definition, our task in
constructing a continuum is to designate those transitional areas in which acting "begins." What
are the simplest characteristics that define acting?

NOT-ACTING
ACTING
NONMATRIXED NONMATRIXED RECEIVED SIMPLE
PERFORMING NEPRESENTATION ACTING ACTING

These characteristics may be either physical or emotional. If the performer does something to
simulate, represent, impersonate, and so forth, he is acting. It does not matter what style he uses
or whether the action is part of a complete characterization or an informational presentation. No
emotion needs to be involved. The definition can depend solely on the character of what is done.
(Value judgments, of course, are not involved. Acting is acting whether or not it is done "well" or
accurately.) Thus a person who, as in the game of charades, pretends to put on a jacket that does
not exist or feigns being ill is acting. Acting can be said to exist in the smallest and simplest action
that involves pretense.

Acting also exists in emotional rather than strictly physical terms, however. Let us say, for
example, that we are at a presentation by the Living Theatre of Paradise Now. It is that well-known
section in which the performers, working individually, walk through the auditorium speaking
directly to the spectators. "I'm not allowed to travel without a passport," they say. "I'm not allowed
to smoke marijuana!" "I'm not allowed to take my clothes off!" They seem sincere, disturbed, and
angry. Are they acting?

The performers are themselves; they are not portraying characters. They are in the theatre,
not in some imaginary or represented place. What they say is certainly true. They are not allowed
to travelat least between certain countrieswithout a passport; the possession of marijuana is
against the law. And I think we will all grant that the performers really believe what they are
sayingthat they really feel these rules and regulations are unjust. Acting exists only in their
emotional presentation.

At times in "real life" we meet a person that we feel is acting. This does not mean that he is
lying, dishonest, living in an unreal world, or that he is necessarily giving a false impression of his
character and personality. It means that he seems to be aware of an audienceto be "onstage"
and that he reacts to this situation by energetically projecting ideas, emotions, and elements of
his personality for the sake of the audience. That is what the performers in Paradise Now were
doing. They were acting their own emotions and beliefs.

Let us phrase this problem in a slightly difierent way. Public speaking, whether it is
extemporaneous or makes use of a script, may involve emotion, but it does not necessarily involve
acting. Yet some speakers, while retaining their own characters and remaining sincere, seem to be
acting. At what point does acting appear? At the point at which the emotions are "pushed" for the
sake of the spectators. This does not mean that the speaker is false or does not believe what he is
saying. It merely means that he is selecting and projecting an element of characterthat is,
emotionto the audience.

In other words it does not matter whether an emotion is ereated to fit an acting situation or
whether it is simply amplified. One principle of "method" actingat least as it is taught in this
countryis the use of whatever real feelings and emotions the actor has while playing the role.
(Indeed, this became quite a joke: No matter what unusual or uncomfortable physical urges or
psychological needs or problems the actor had, he was advised to "use" them.) It may be merely
the use and projection of emotion that distinguishes acting from not-acting.

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I think that this is an important point. It indicates that acting involves a basic psychic or
emotional component; although this component exists in all forms of acting to some degree
(except, of course, received acting), it in itself is enough to distinguish acting from not-acting.
Because this element of acting is mental, a performer may act without moving. I do not mean
that, as has been mentioned previously, the motionless person "acts" in a passive and "received"
way by having a character, a relationship, a place, and so on imposed on him by the information
provided in the presentation. The motionless performer may convey certain attitudes and
emotions that are acting even though no physical action is involved.

Further examples of rudimentary actingas well as examples of not-actingmay be seen in
the well-known "mirror" exercise in which two people stand facing each other while one copies or
"reflects," as if he were a mirror, the movements of the other. Although this is an exercise used in
training actors, acting itself is not necessarily involved. The movements of the first person, and
therefore those of the second, might not represent or pretend. Each might merely raise and
lower his arms or turn his head. The movements could be completely abstract.

It is here, however, that the perceived relationship between the performer and what he is
creating can be seen to be crucial to the definition of acting. Even "abstract" movements may be
personified and made into a character of sorts through the performer's attitude. If he seems to
indicate "I am this thing" rather than merely "I am doing these movements," we accept him as the
"thing": He is acting. Nevertheless, we do not accept the "mirror" as acting, even though he is a
"representation" of the first person. He lacks the psychic energy that would turn the abstraction
into a personification. If an attitude of "I am imitating you" is projected, howeverif purposeful
distortion or "editorializing" appears rather than the neutral attitude of exact copyingthe
mirror becomes an actor even though the original movements were abstract.

The same exercise may easily involve acting in a more obvious way. The first person, for
example, may pretend to shave. The mirror, in copying these feigned actions, becomes an actor
now in spite of his neutral attitude. (We could call him a received actor because, like character
and place in our earlier examples, the representation has been "put on" him without that inner
creative attitude and energy necessary for true acting. His acting, like that of a marionette, is
controlled from the outside.) If the originator in the mirror exercise put on his jacket, he would
not necessarily be acting; if he or the mirror, not having a jacket, pretended to put one on, it
would be acting, and so on.

As we have moved along the continuum from not-acting to acting, the amount of
representation, personification, and so forth has increased. Now that we have arrived at true
acting, we may say that it, too, varies in amount. Small "amounts" of actinglike those in the
examples that have been givenwill occupy that part of the scale closest to received acting, and
we can move along the continuum to a hypothetical "maximum amount" of acting. Indeed, the
only alternative would seem to be an "on-off'or "all or-nothing" view in which all acting is
theoretically (if not qualitatively) equal and undifferentiated.

Amount is a difficult word to use in this case, however. Because, especially for Americans, it is
easy to assume that "more is better," any reference to amount may be taken to indicate relative
value or worth. It is better to speak of simple and complex acting with the hope that these terms can
be accepted as objective and descriptive rather than evaluative. After all, simple and complex are
terms that may be ascribed quite easily and without an implied value judgment to other
performance arts such as music and dance. A ballad is relatively simple compared to a symphony;
the ordinary fox-trot is much less complex than the filmed dances of Fred Astaire. Let us apply
the same kind of analysis to acting, remembering that simple acting, such as we saw in the mirror
exercise, may be very good, whereas complex acting is not necessarily good and may, indeed, be
quite bad.

&*
Complex acting, then, would be the final condition on our acting/not-acting continuum.
What do we mean by complex acting? In what ways can acting be simple or complex?

NOT-ACTING
ACTING
NONMATRIXED NONMATRIXED RECEIVED SIMPLE COMPLEX
PERFORMING REPRESENTATION ACTING ACTING
ACTING

The simplest acting is that in which only one element or dimension of acting is used.
Emotion, as we have seen, may be the only area in which pretense takes place. Or, as in the
mirror exercise, only an action such as putting on a jacket may be simulated. Other acting
exercises attempt to isolate various aspects of acting, and they are proof that behavior, which is
complex, can be broken down into simple units.

The simple/complex scale also applies to each individual aspect of acting. Emotion may be
generalized and unchanging, or it may be specific, modulating and changing frequently within a
given period of time. An action may be performed in a simple or a complex way. In the game of
charades, for example, we may only indicate that we are putting on a jacket. As long as our team
understands what we are doing, the acting is successful. The same action becomes more complex
as details such as the resistance of the material, the degree of fit, the weight of the jacket, and so
on are acted.

(The word indicate that was just used in connection with charades has negative connotations
in the technical vocabulary of the American "method." Practitioners of the method cannot accept
an element of acting that exists in relative isolation and is not totally integrated by being
"justified" and related to other elements. In other styles, however, isolated acting elements are
perfectly acceptable and are used, among other things, to focus attention.)

Acting becomes complex as more and more elements are incorporated into the pretense. Let
us say that the performer putting on a jacket is part of a scene: he may choose to act emotion
(fear, let us say), physical characteristics (the person portrayed is old), place (there is a bright
sun), and many other elements. Each of these could be performed in isolation, but when they are
presented simultaneously or in close proximity to each other, the acting becomes complex. In a
like manner it is obvious that when speech is added to mime, the resultant acting is more
complex than the mime alone; the acting involved in a staged reading will, in all likelihood, be
less complex than the acting in a fully staged production of the same script, and so forth.

In part, complexity is related to skill and technical ability. Some styles make use of a highly
specialized vocabulary that is quite complex. This does not contradict our earlier statement that
the acting/not-acting continuum is independent of value judgments. It is not a question of
whether a performer can do certain complex acting well but whether he can do it at all. Anyone
can act; not everyone can act in a complex way.

Yet the analysis of acting according to simple/complex does not necessarily distinguish one
style from another, although it could be used to compare styles of acting. Each style has a certain
range when measured on a simple/complex scale, and in almost all performances the degree of
complexity varies somewhat from moment to moment. It would be impossible to say, for example,
that the realistic style of acting is necessarily more complex than the "Grotowski style" of
expressionism. Realism, in its most complete and detailed form, would certainly be considered
relatively complex. Yet there are many approaches to realism; somesuch as those used in many
filmsask very little of the actor and would be considered relatively simple. The film actor may
do very little, while the camera and the physical/informational context do the "acting" for him. A
nonrealistic style, however, such as that developed by Grotowski can also be extremely complex.
&"
When I saw The Constant Prince, I felt that I had never seen performers act so much: the impression
was not one of overacting but of many things taking
place simultaneously in the work of a single actor. During the Prince's long monologues the
other performers did not decrease the complexity of their acting; their bodies were frequently
involved in F numerous, detailed, small-scale movements. In part, at least, this complexity may be
explained by Grotowski's exercises, which are designed to develop the ability of the actor to
express different, and even contradictory, things with different parts of his body at the same time.
However, other companies that use what may be recognized as Grotowski style act very simply.

Thus, we have arrived at a scale that measures the amount or i degree of representation,
simulation, impersonation, and so forth in performance behavior. Although the polar states are
acting and not-acting, we can discern a continuous increase in the degree of representation from
nonmatrixed performing through nonmatrixed representation, received acting, and simple
acting to complex acting.

Belief may exist in either the spectator or the performer, but it does not affect objective
classification according to our acting/not-acting scale. Whether an actor feels what he is doing to
be "real" or a spectator really "believes" what he sees does not change the classification of the
performance; it merely suggests another area or parameter.

Various types and styles of acting are, indeed, seen as more or less realistic, but, except as an
indication of style, the word reality has little usefulness when applied to acting. From one point of
view all acting is, by definition, "unreal" because pretense, impersonation, and so forth are
involved. From another point of view all acting is real. Philosophically, a No play is as real (if not
as realistic) as a Chekhov production. Pretense and impersonation, even in those rare cases when
they are not recognized as such, are as real as anything else.

Most plays, of course, even the most naturalistic ones, do not attempt to fool the observer into
thinking that they are realthat they do not involve acting. Illusionary stagecraft and realistic
acting do not intend or expect to be taken for real life any more than an illusionistic painting is
intended to be mistaken for what it represents. In almost all performances we see the "real"
person and also what he is representing or pretending. The actor is visible within the character.

To say that no performance can deceive a spectator would not be true, however. True and
complete illusion is possible in the theatre; acting may actually "lie," be believed, and be seen as
not being acting at all. This happened in Norman Taffel's Little Trips. Little Trips began with an
enactment by two performers of the story of Cassandra, who was captured by the Greeks when
Troy fell. After acting out several incidentsthe entry of the Trojan Horse, the rape of
Cassandra, and so onthe spectators, who were standing around the performing area, were
asked to join the actors, if they wished, and to play the same incidents, which would be repeated.
At some point in the first or second repetition, while some spectators watched and others
participated, the play began to break down. Perhaps one of the spectators protested that they
should notfor this was one of the carefully selected imagesbe spitting in "Cassandra's" mouth.
Perhaps the performers began to argue, and the spectators took sides. At each performance there
was an argument; the play, as it had been described to the spectators in a preliminary
introduction, never ended. This is the way the presentation had been planned, however. By
talking to and exploiting the feelings of the participating spectators, with whom they were able to
talk more or less informally, the actors were often able to make them, unknowingly, part of the
planned "breakdown" of the performance. The entire performance was designed to move from
the context of "art" to that of "life." Many people actually believed it; indeed, some never
discovered that what they thought was a real argument that "destroyed the performance had
actually been acted.

&#
(During Little Trips the two performers changed from a rather simple form of acting that
could be more or less copied by participating members of the audience to a conversational style,
the realism of which was, perhaps, heightened by the contrast. In terms of our previous discussion
of acting, however, it is important to note that the effect of reality did not depend entirely on the
acting. It is not only the behavior of the performers but the total performance experience that
determines the spectator's response. What creates an illusion in one context will not necessarily
do so in another, and in other frames of reference the same acting would have remained acting.)

There is another type of performance in which the spectator does not recognize the acting
for what it really is. I remember meeting an Argentine architect who told of her experiences at an
all-night religious ceremony of some sort on the northern coast of Brazil. At one point costumed
performers appeared who were thought to be dead ancestors. This caused panic among the
believers because the doors were locked, and they thought if these ghost beings touched them
they, too, would die. Although belief of this kind obviously affects the quality of the experience, it
does not mean that pretense, impersonation, and so forth were not involved in the performance.
The appearance of the "dead ancestors was acted.

Even if the performers believed themselves to be dead, acting would have been involved.
Belief would not change the objective fact that something or someone was being represented.
This is not to say that belief cannot be an important aspect of acting in certain styles. A principle
of the method that achieved the stature of a clich was the attempt by the actor to really believe
what the character was doing. If he was successful, the audience would really believe, too. There is
no question that this approach has frequently been successful. The attempt to believe undoubtedly
attains or approaches with some certainty and predictability the goals that are sought, and it well
may be the best approach to these particular problems. At the same time it is just as clear that
belief is not an acceptable criterion for an actor. Many times the actor, when faced with a certain
lack of belief by his audience, protests that he really believed. The important point, however, is that
when belief is present or is attained by a performer, acting itself does not disappear. The
acting/not-acting scale measures pretense, impersonation, feigning, and so forth; it is
independent of either the spectator's or the performer's belief.

During the last ten or twelve years theatre in the United States has undergone a more
complete and radical change than in any other equivalent period in its history. At least this is true
of the theatre considered as an art rather than as a craft, business, or entertainment. Since, in the
past, almost all of American theatre has been craft, business, or entertainment, this may not be a
very startling fact, but the changes have been striking and extensive. Every aspect of performance
has been affected, including acting. As recently as the fall and winter of 1964 The Drama Review
could devote two complete issues to Stanislavsky; now the method no longer has the absolute
dominance it once did in this country, and certain alternative approaches are attracting great
interest. Everyone now seems to realize that acting does not mean just one thingthe attempt to
imitate life in a realistic and detailed fashion.

Thus eclecticism or diversity in the approaches to acting is one aspect of the recent change in
American theatre. In terms of our theoretical acting/not-acting continuum, however, we can be
more specific: There has, within the last ten years, been a shift toward the not-acting end of the
scale. This means not only that more nonmatrixed performing has been used but that, in a
number of ways, acting has grown less complex. A brief review of recent developments will allow
us to examine how this has come about while also providing additional examples of the various
areas on the acting/ not-acting scale.

The most important single factor in the recent changes in per formance has been the so-
called Happening. Happenings, of course, are now a part of history. The term is best used in a
completely historical and sociological way to refer to those works created as part of the
international Happenings movement of the early and mid-1960s. (The first piece called a
&$
Happening was done in 1959, but other generically similar works preceded it, and the term is
important only as a reference and as a popular catchphrase.) The necessary thing to notice,
however, is that works that, on completely formal grounds, can be called Happenings continue to
be done and that almost all of the many innovations produced by Happenings have been applied
to narrative, informational, acted theatre. Although I have no wish to perpetuate the name, those
who think that Happenings were unimportant, or that the theatre form characterized by
Happenings is no longer alive merely because the word is no longer used, are lit'erary and do not
understand the nature of the form. At any rate, the Happening can help to explain much about
current developments in acting.

Under the direct influence of Happenings every aspect of theatre in this country has
changed: scripts have lost their importance and performances are created collectively; the
physical relationship of audience and performance has been altered in many different ways and
has been made an inherent part of the piece; audience participation has been investigated;
"found" spaces rather than theatres have been used for performance and several different places
employed sequentially for the same performance; there has been an increased emphasis on
movement and on visual imagery (not to mention a soon commercialized use of nudity), and so
forth. It would be difficult to find any avant-garde performance in this country that did not show
the influence of Happenings in one way or another. But Happenings made little use of acting.
How, then, could they have anything to do with the recent changes in acting? One way to see this
is to examine the historical relationship between Happenings and the more prominent United
States theatre groups. The history is not very old, but things are forgotten very quickly.

The last play that the Living Theatre produced before going into their period of self-imposed
exile in Europe was The Brig. It was a realistic play with supposed documentary aspects, and it
emphasized the "fourth wall": a high wire-mesh fence closed off the proscenium opening,
separating the spectators and the performers. When the Living Theatre opened their next
production in Paris in October 1964, their style and form, if not the sociopolitical nature of their
content, had changed completely. Mysteries and Smaller
Pieces was a Happening. (They would later do another piece, Paradise Now, that could also
have been called a Happening.)

Of course, Mysteries was not called a Happening by the Living Theatre, and few, especially in
Europe, recognized it as such. (Claes Oldenburg, who was the first one I knew to see it, identified
it, but this might have been expected. He had seen quite a few Happenings.) At any rate the
performance was without plot, story, or narrative. It was divided into sequential scenes or
compartments: one emphasized movement, another sound, another the smell of incense, and so
forth. Some even involved acyng. The performance was apparently put together on rather short
notice and was the work of the group rather than any one writer. (Almost all of the major
Happenings were the product of one artist's imagination, but Happenings often were created by a
group, each of whom contributed his specialtymusic, design, poetry, and so forthand, among
other things, the form gained the reputation of being a group creation, thus inspiring those who
were dissatisfied with working from an author's previously written script.) Certain images in
Mysteries and Smaller Pieces came from The Brig, but much of it was taken from outside the group
and was identical or similar to various "event" and Happening images.

In one of the later sections of Mysteries all of the members of the cast died. That is, they
pretended to die. Death can by symbolized, but they chose to act it. No acting of this sort was
taking place in the Happenings; the Living Theatre chose to use elements of acting within the
Happening structure. But the acting did not involve character, place, or situationother than,
perhaps, the conditions of the Artaudian plague that was the cause of death. The actors were only
themselves "dying" in the aisles and on the stage of the theatre.

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This simplification of acting is typical of much of the work in the new theatre. Indeed, the
movement toward the nonmatrixed or reality end of our acting/not-acting continuum made
some wonder when death itself would become real rather than "merely" acted in performance. In
Happening-like presentations Ralph Ortizand others before himhad decapitated live
chickens. Peter Brook included the burning of a butterfly in US. (Live butterflies were seen flying
out of a box, but there is some doubt whether the burned butterfly was indeed real. Cutting the
head off a chicken makes death obvious; a butterfly can be "faked." "We cannot tell," reads the
script of US, "if it is real or false.")

One of the scenes in Mysteries and Smaller Pieces was a sound-and-movement exercise taken
from the Open Theatre. Two lines of performers face each other. A performer from one line
moves toward the other line, making a particular sound-and-movement combination. A person
from the second line "takes" the movement and sound, changing them before passing them on to
someone in the first line, and so forth. Like the mirror exercise that was discussed earlier, this use
of an acting exercise as an actual performance is one way to simplify acting by concen<rating on
one or a limited number of elements. Exercises, often more integrated into the action than was
this example, are frequently used in the new theatre for their performance qualities and
expressiveness rather than for their training values.

I believe that it was this same exercise that opened the first public performances of the Open
Theatre. These presentations, which began in December 1963 and continued into 1965,
combined various exercises and short plays on the same bill. It would be foolish to claim a
kinship with Happenings for these "variety" programs, but one wonders whether the similarity
between the exercises and certain "game" and task-oriented work by, among others, the Judson
Dance Theatre did not suggest the possibility of presenting the exercises, which were designed to
be done privately, to the public.

Yet another company that showed exercises and made them part of a longer piece is The
Performance Group. In their first public presentation, on a 1968 benefit program with other
groups, they performed an "Opening Ceremony" composed of exercises adapted from Jerzy
Grotowski with certain vocal additions. This "Ceremony"dropped, as I recall, after Grotowski
saw the productionwas in Dionysus in 69 when it opened. Grotowski himself would never show
exercises as performance. This merely emphasizes the complexity of his work and the difference
between it and even the people in this country who were most influenced by it.

The effect of Happenings on Richard Schechner's work predated The Performance Group,
however. The New Orleans Group, which he organized in late 1965, produced a large and
spectacular Happening in 1966 and then adapted the various technical means and the
audience/performance relationship of the Happening to an "environmental" production of
Ionesco's Victims of Duty in 1967. The use of real names, personal anecdotal material, and so forth
in Dionysus in 69 can be seen as an attempt to move away from complex acting toward the
nonmatrixed performing of Happenings.

Happenings somehow gained the reputation for exhibitionism; some certainly had camp
aspects. It was probably their use of the untrained performerthe "found" person/actor, so to
speakthat had the most influence on the Theatre of the Ridiculous. John Vacarro, who
performed in at least one of Robert Whitman's Happenings, has explained how important the
eqerienck was to him. The unabashedly homemade quality of many Happenings was also an
inspiration to many people who did not have an inclination toward slickness, craft, and
technique.

I do not mean to suggest that the general movement toward the simplification of acting is
entirely owing to the direct influence of Happenings. There have been many factors, all
interdependent to some extent: Viola Spolin's improvisations; Grotowski's emphasis on
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confrontation, disarming, and the via negativa; an interest in developing ensembles; and the early
desire of the Open Theatre to find techniques that were applicable to the Theatre of the Absurd.
(In regard to the last it should be noted that, with Teminal, the Open Theatre moved into a form
quite similar to some Happenings in both structure and use of imagery.)

Yet influence can also be indirect. Happenings have contributed their share to the creation of
a state of mind that values the concrete as opposed to the pretended or simulated and that does
not require plots or stories. The most original playwright of recent years, Peter Handke, has
worked in this area. Although his plays are quite different from most of the new theatre in this
country, many of them illustrate the same concern with the simplification of acting.

Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation by Handke are rather unusual plays, if they can be
called plays at all. Handke refers to them as "speak-ins" (Sprechstcke). They do not employ any
matrices of place or character. They take place on plain, bare stages; the actors do not relate to or
refer to imaginary locales. The performers are themselves; they are not dressed in any unusual
way, neither do they portray characters. In fact, Handke has written dialogue for performers who
do not necessarily have to act. The scripts require no pretense or emotion.

The performers speak. They have memorized what Handke has written and they have
rehearsed. But this does not, in itself, make a person an actor. People recite poems and speeches
without acting. Musicians rehearse, are concerned with timing, and respond to cues. None of
these factors defines acting. What the performers say are, almost entirely, direct statements that
would be true no matter who was speaking them. In Offending the Audience they speak about the
performance situation: "You are sitting in rows You are looking at us when we speak to you
This is no mirage The possibilities of the theatre are not exploited here." In Self-Accusation the
two "speakers," as Handke calls them rather than "actors," talk about themselves: "I came into the
world I saw I said my name." There is no need to act in order to perform this material.

If Self-Accusation were played by a blind "speaker," however, the statement "I saw" would be
untrue. Or, to take a somewhat less facetious example from the later passages that are no longer
so universally applicable, certain people could not say, as if they believed it, the line "I came into
the world afflicted with original sin" without feigning. But even a blind person could use the word
saw metaphorically, and Handke does not suggest that each of the lines has to be given as if the
speaker believed it. There are interpretations that would avoid any kind of acting during the
performance.

However, these observations are based only on the script, and there is no script, including
Handke's speak-ins, that can prevent acting. Let us say that a performer creates an emotion. In
Offending the Audience, for example, he pretends to be angry at the spectators when, actually, he is
glad that they are there. An element of acting has been added to the performance. The
presentation would then be using what we have called simple acting. Under a certain director
each of the actors might even create a well rounded characterization; the acting could become
complex. Knowing the eagerness of actors to act, I doubt whether there has ever been a
production of these scripts that did, in fact, avoid the use of acting.

Handke's My Foot, My Tutor, makes use of simple acting by reducing the performers' means:
the two characters do not talk, they wear neutral half-masks and, for the most part, they perform
ordinary movements (that sometimes seem extraordinary because they contradict expectancies
and do not "fit" the context). The play does involve charactersa Warden and a Wardbut
much of the action provokes the question "What is acted, and what is real?" There is a cat in the
play. A cat cannot be trained and does not act: In the performance "The cat does what it does."
Timing depends on the will of the actor, but the length of one scene depends on the length of
time it actually takes water to boil in a teakettle. The Ward eats an apple just as he would if he
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were not acting: "as if no one were watching." Yet he fails, for no reason, to slice a beet with a
large and powerful beet-cutting machine: obviously he is only pretending.

These scripts by Peter Handke show, among other things, that the playwright, too, may use an
awareness of the acting/not-acting continuum. Although his control (exerted only through the
written word) over the complexity of the acting is limited, he may still deal with the nature and
degree of acting itself as an element in the script. And Handke's early work is another illustration
of a general but not universal shift among contemporary theatre artists toward simple acting and
the not-acting end of the scale.

It must be emphasized that the acting/not-acting scale is not intended to establish or suggest
values of any kind. Objectively, all points on the scale are equally good. It is only personal taste
that prefers complex acting to simple acting or nonmatrixed performing to acting. The various
degrees of representation and personification are "colors," so to speak, in the spectrum of human
performance;
the artist may use whichever colors he prefers.

In spite of Handke's example one importance of attempting a formulation such as the
acting/not-acting scale lies in the fact that it is a practical theatre tool as opposed to a literary
one. The qualities and characteristics of acting can be determined only in performance. We have
a great heritage in the analysis of dramatic literature, but it is vitally necessary to develop
techniques and methods for the analysis of performance.

Such analysis need not be purely philosophical and academic. Just as literary analysis
contributed much to playwriting, performance analysis should contribute directly to all of the arts
of the stage. It should be relevant, pragmatic, eminently useful, and stimulating.
&(

CEE S. BROWN

Performance Art: A New Form of Theatre, Not a New Concept in Art

Three major elements serve to link performance art to theatre. According to Cee Brown these are a
performer, an audience, and a message to be conveyed by the performer to the audience. However, there
are, of course, several important differences between performance art and theatre, and in this essay,
written in 1979, the author outlines the similarities and differences and explains their direct effect on
performance art itself.

Cee S. Brown is the director of Holly Solomon Editions, New York. As an assistant to the
Department of Education at The Museum of Modern Art, he established the Performance Artists'
Archive.

Why is it that so many people are voicing the opinion that performance art is going nowhere
fast? Can it be that there are people searching for qualitative rather than quantitative art
mediums? Is it possible that there are still those seeking palatable and easily digested art? Can the
fact that most often performance art does not reap many commercial benefits for those involved
be detrimental to the art form? Practically speaking, is it conceivable that there are those who
would attend more performances if they were not held so far downtown or out of the way? What
about someone who wants to learn more about performance art: where can he go for reference?
Currently there is a great deal of performance activity going on: some of it is bad, some is good,
very little is great. However, I think a clear definition of the role that performance art plays in
society is needed, and that definition will probably assist us in answering the above questions.

As much as I should like to define and defend the art form as a new and unique medium, I
cannot. Performance art is a new form of theatre, but it is certainly not a totally new concept in
art. The format of performance is like that of theatre and/or dance: there is a performer, an
audience, and a message to be conveyed by the performer to the audience. Some artists insist that
what they do in their performances is more like painting than theatre or dance. These artists may
indeed be painting very visual images with their bodies and movements and words, but the choice
of presentation has made the art a form of theatre. When I entered Sonnabend Gallery to see
Joan Jonas's Upside Down and Backwards (1979), I was asked to sit in front of an obviously staged
area, and I immediately slid into the role of "audience." In Joan's beautiful and clever piece,
dance, drawing, music, narrative, and painting comprised the audience's experience; however,
her presentation was a form of theatre. Arleen Schloss works with letters and music and words.
She uses video monitors and live action to present her message to the audience. Her
performances are generally fast-moving, very witty, and employ the alphabet and alphabetical
recitation of lists of words relating to where she is or what she is doing. When she did It's A at
MoMA at The Museum of Modem Art as part of a performance series in October 1978, she rattled
off, with rather alarming I speed, hundreds of words keyed into the museum, its collection, and
artists. Although Arleen's work may not be the first thing that comes into someone's mind if
theatre is mentioned, indeed what she does is theatrical both in content and in presentation.

Much conventional theatre has several components that performance does not. Theatre is
often structured as follows:

A playwright produces a script.
A producer decides to back it and finds a director and a the atre company to do it.
Casting takes place, and actors are assigned roles.
The director stages the entire play, sometimes in collaboration with the playwright.
The finished product is presented to audiences on a repeated basis.

&)
Most often in performance art, this is not the case. Instead:

A performance artist comes up with his/her piece.
The piece is staged in the artist's mind.
Sometimes other people are asked to participate, if necessary.
The artist searches for a gallery or alternative space that is willing to provide the space for the
performance.
The piece is done once, perhaps several times.

In a conversation with Barbara Smith, a California performance artist, the difference between
theatre and performance art became more apparent to me. Many artists perform in theatrelike
contexts, but it was pointed out that each time an artist does a piece, it can be new, different, and
open to spontaneous change and growth. Lines are not necessarily committed to memory,
neither are there many stage directions, and unlike most conventional theatre, each time a piece
is done it can be new for the artist as well as for the viewers. This should not preclude our seeing
that the distinction between conventional theatre and this new form of theatre, performance art,
is sometimes very slight. The work of Mabou Mines is considered by most critics and her peers to
be performance, but it is so close to being conventional theatre that the difference is negligible.
Spalding Gray is another artist in this category, as are Michael Meyers and Guy de Cointet. Their
works are so close to theatre that one could, I suppose, call them that. Yet there is something in
their works that is avant-garde (if that word still has meaning), that distinguishes them from, for
example, the works of Beckett or Ionesco.
I feel that those who make a hard-edge and sure distinction between theatre and performance
only give a "preciousness" to performance art that it does not deserve or need. It would be ideal
to be able to draw from the rich history of theatre and to skip over the unstable and difficult
formative years of becoming established as a legtimate art form. Because performance is a new
form of theatre, it need not struggle with these growing pains and fight for acceptance as, for
example, video art does. Video, an almost completely new medium, has many obstacles to
overcome; however, performance art, because it has so much in common with traditional theatre,
can avoid most of these. Performance needs only popular acceptance as a form of theatre to
begin to be thougbt of, looked at, and written about as such.

In the past two years [1977-1979] the amount of performance work being done has more
than doubled. Surprisingly, despite the increasing number of active performance artists and the
improved quality of their material, there has not been much growth in critical writing about
performance art. Much of the writing being done is merely descriptive and tends to use the
vernacular of the traditional art forms of painting and sculpture, shying away from the
explorator) and the critical. A new vocabulary should be assimilated
by artists and critics, galleries and museums. With the advantage of a species-specific
language, perhaps writing about performance could more closely approach criticism and analysis
rather than description.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward categorizing the various areas of
performance art. Critics writing about performances often discuss the pieces anly in terms of
theatre or dance. This establishes a format wherein the work is not absorbed and regarded with a
critical eye as "performance," but rather is compared to and evaluated by conventional theatre or
dance standards. Although performance is, in my opinion, a form of theatre, it requires some
independence and it should not be compared to theatre or dance in the conventional mode.
One critic recently wrote of a performance piece: "The performance was picturesque and well
staged, but if one is going to do theater, why doesn't one do good theater? It seems that a
distinction between theatre and theatrelike performance was not clear to that critic.
'+

There are relatively few galleries and alternative spaces in New York and other major
American cities that support performance activity. These are usually small spaces, often situated
in out-of-the-way locations. Invariably, these institutions are state and/or federally subsidized,
understaffed, and overworked. I conjecture that performance artists would have more exposure
and more farreaching effects if they were to do their work in less remote spaces where there is a
potential for larger audiences. To do this, however, requires finding larger and more
commercially oriented galleries that are interested in performance. If artists could work in spaces
where getting there is not like trekking into the wild unknown, perhaps audiences would be
larger and not composed only of friends and peers of the artists but interested observers and
supporters as well.

Financially, performance events do not realize much profit for either the sponsors of the
program or the artists. Often artists need to rent expensive sound, video, and film equipment for
their pieces for one evening or other short time periods. Even if galleries or alternative spaces
charge admission to performances, the expenses usually surpass the income. I am told that if an
artist breaks even, he considers himself lucky.

Obviously, one cannot buy a performance. In this it is very much like theatre. But when one
compares the admission prices of Broadway or off-Broadway shows to performance admissions (if
there are any), the difference is sorely evident: fifteen dollars to twenty-five dollars and one dollar
to three dollars.

At this time there are not many sources of reference for performance art. RoseLee Goldberg's
book Performance: Live Art From 1909 to the Present (1979) is a good historical document of
performanceas a subcurrent of the varied art movements since the beginning of the century.
There are a few critics who are not too timid to mention, at least periodically, performance in
their articles. However, there are relatively few reliable informational sources about performance
art that are accessible to the general public. Certainly there are publications that are well known
to the cognoscenti of many art circles, including Art Com, High Performance, Performance Art, and
Alive. I hope that the Performance Artists' Archive that I began over two years ago under the aegis
of The Museum of Modern Art can help fill in the large gaps between artist and audience by
making artists' statements about their works accessible to the public; providing visual
documentation of artists' performances; and establishing personal contact with the astists if
people should wish to discuss the works with the artists. In the near future I should like to think
that artists might consider video-taping performances before or after an actual performancenot
a documentation video tape, but rather a video-taped performance. These tapes could then be
presented in a "video jukebox" format, allowing the audience to select for individual viewing a
variety of tapes of performances made by the performance artists. Then those who could not
attend certain performances could still get a good feeling for the pieces, and this enlarged
exposure of the artists' works would be good for the artists as well as for the public. I think the old
adage "The best customer is an educated consumer" is certainly applicable.
'*

FRANOIS PLUCHART

Risk as the Practice of Thought

Perfomance and body art works by diverse American and European artists, including Helmut
Schober, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Dennis Oppenheim, Gina Pane, and Hermann Nitsch, seem to
involve elements of risk, either in practice or in theory. Whether such works are actually physically
risky or dangerous is not the point, rather it is risk as a theoretical presence that is examined in this
essay by Franois Pluchart. How does the use of risk define itself? What is the relation of risk to the
creative act? How has the meaning of body art been determined by the presence of risk? When is risk
symbolic?

These are but a few of the questions dealt with by Pluchart, a well-known French art critic who
has written extensively on modern art and modern art theory.

The staging of risk, of suffering, and of death cannot be dissociated from the history of
Western art. It even constitutes a sort of archetype, inasmuch as any creation tends to be a
metaphysics or, at least, a transcendence of the hard existential reality. However, beginning wth
the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, let us say since Courbet, the artist tends to
become more and more deeply committed to social struggle and to gamble his safety against his
ideas. The movement precipitates during the twentieth century, first with the nonaligned ones
from Stalinist orthodoxy, then in relationship to revolutionary or dictatorial situations. This
experience of risk, though, is just the most outward aspectand certainly not its bestof the
artist's responsibility, of the danger of being an artist (to play a role in the course of thought).
The more or less deeply acquired experience of folly and of disorder of the senses (Rimbaud,
Van Gogh, Artaud, for example), which touches certain mythical temptations, clearly underlines
the price an artist must often pay in order to steal an assent and to bend enslaving ideologies.

Generally, risk remains theoretical, a kind of by-product of the masochism inherent in every
creative act, and actually one had to wait for the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s
to see the artists endanger their bodies and inflict on themselves a violent physical suffering in
order to produce thought.

Except for a few Dadaist provocations, particularly those of Johannes Baaden and Arthur
Cravan, the first artists who exposed their bodies to public filth and aggressiveness are four
VienneseHermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Gnter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler: Muehl, with
his political actions, Nitsch with ritual ones, Schwarzkogler with sexual disalienation, and,
eveamore so, Brus, with actions that involve defecation and the swallowing of urine. Bodily risk is
present as well in some of Joseph Beuys's actions having a desecrating nature. In all these cases
the aim is to denounce determinisms, taboos, obstacles to freedom and to the individual's
expression, whether it belongs to social, or family, or other structures. The artistic use of risk
quickly defined itself through the first important statements of body art, particularly those by
Oppenheim, Acconci, Journiac, Gina Pane, and Chris Burden.

Beginning in 1970, Dennis Oppenheim, in a work called Parallel Stress, put his body in danger
by hanging in the void from a collapsed concrete casting between the Brooklyn Bridge and
Manhattan. And again in 1971, with Rocked Circle-Fear, and Reading Position for Second-Degree Burn.
In the first of the two Oppenheim was standing still inside a 5-foot-diameter circle. A person
above him was throwing stones inside the circle while a movie camera was recording his facial
expressions. This action had to be interrupted before the artist expected.

In the second, which lasted five hours, Oppenheim in a sense painted his body red by means
of sunburn, with the exception of his chest, which was protected by an open book. Although
'"
Oppenheim soon dropped dangerous actions, pain often plays a role in his work: in Arm and Wire
(1969), in which he ran his arm over an electric wire and used a string to mark the trace left on
his skin; and in Interchange Material (1970), in which he ripped off a fingernail and stuck a wood
splinter into his finger.

The second American artist who used pain as a creative element is Vito Acconci, a poet who,
beginning in 1969, progressively abandoned the space of the written page for a place in which the
body was assigned the task of going beyond the poetic function. Acconci's body actions at first
tried to define the artist's body as a place where he could intervene and create an event by
measuring at the same time different types of feelings, such as a pain caused by a burn or a bite,
the variations of the biological rhythm during an intellectual or physical effort, his resistance to
physical or psychic fatigue, and so forth (see See Through, 1969; Rubbing Piece, Trademarks, Hand &
Mouth, 1970). This period was,somehow that of his language formation. In a second moment, he
started to modify his own body, as in Conversions, an action of which he gave two versions with a
one-year interval (1970 and 1971) and in which he experienced the possibility of going from the
masculine to the feminine, by burning the hair on his chest, by pulling his nipples in the attempt
to achieve a feminine appearance, by hiding his penis between his thighs and training his body to
perform, in this new position, a great number of familiar actions, such as walking, dancing,
jumping, sitting down, and finally making his penis disappear into the mouth of a young woman
kneeling behind him. This work marks an evolution toward the projection of the individual body
on another and above all the awareness of the transformation of that individual body through its
insertion into society. Starting from this moment and in opposition to what happened in his
earlier actions, he tends to elude the spectator's eye by imposing his presence only through his
voice, his body's movements, the inner throb of his biology. As in Trapping (1971), in which he
converses with his penis covered with a white cloth; in Seedbed of the same year, in which he
masturbates until exhaustion while the audience is walking above him; as in Anchors (1972), in
which he dreams he has a sister.

For Acconci, whose main preoccupation is the body's physical space, the body action tends to
modify the individual physically and psychically, as well as to transform it thanks to the practice of
a mental tension. The action ends at the ultimate stage of exhaustion, at the approach of death,
which, if it actually came, would be for the artist a kind of setback, a final change that would
brutally interrupt a process of potential change, of physical endurance, and of self-surmounting.
Like many artists of this tendency, Acconci subsequently moved toward more plastic actions, in
which he has reintroduced language.

The third American in the most exasperated art trend is Chris Burden. Beyond the violence
of their themes, many of his actions constitute a physical provocation as well, in particular Five-
Day Locker Piece (April 26-30, 1971), a work for which the artist was closed in a locker for five days;
Shoot of the same year, in which a sharpshooter at a distance of five steps hit him in the arm with
a 22-caliber rifle bullet; Deadman (1972), in which heplaced himself under a tarpaulin at 8:00
P.M., on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, near a car marked by two danger fire signals of
fifteen-minutes' duration. Through the Night Softly (1973), in which, his hands behind his back, he
crawled on broken glass for fifteen yards. Missed by a sharpshooter, or stopped by the police at
the very moment the flares were going out and nothing could have protected him from a real
accident, Chris Burden has taken art to the verge of suicide.

In Europe Michel Journiac has played a determining role in the definition of a mode of art
expression in which thinking, in its most acute sense, takes risks as far as the individual's very
existence is concerned. After he dehed, in a book of poems, Le Sang nu (1968), and an
exhibition, the body in its double aspect of flesh and sex, he took to revealing the implications of
his political awareness. Many of his events have subsequently aimed at specifying this scandalous
definition of the body, an entity despised, derided, disowned by allnpolitical or religious forms of
government.
'#

Each Journiac certainty, followed or made explicit by an event, is a trap in which he shuts
himself up in order to find his own values for liberation. Starting with social travesty and that
sexual coadjutant that is attire, he defined at successive times the existence of the body through
the faculties of change, offering, and desire, its physical and biological components, its being
available to mutilations, to being destroyed, to feed a gluttonous society. For Journiac, the body
can be approached only through rituals. Some of the rituals he has created or of which he has
diverted the meaning have had a great impact on the evolution of contemporary thinking. It is
especially the case in Messe pour un corps (1969), an event in which he stated his solitude by
offering a pudding made with his own blood; Contrat pour une excution capitale (1971), which is an
accusation thrown at the obsolete partisans of capital punishment; and Pige pour un travesti
(1972), which showed the passing from masculine to feminine mediated by clothing. Whether
they are at the deepest level of being or more immediately physical (for instance: drawing blood
in view of making the human blood pudding, from 1969, or cigarette burns in Rituel pour un mort
of 1976), pain and risk are present in all Journiac's works, and it is precisely through them that
today's art can try to carry out a cathartic action.

After having shown that the body is the most stubborn taboo, that it is manipulated, mutilated
by all ideologies, and that body censorship is first of all the denial of the individual, Journiac
asserted that the indictment of a castrating and degrading system was of extreme urgency, as well
as the only ineluctable duty of the creator, who, at any price, must say no to the restriction of the
being. There is no doubt that this attitude permanently puts the artist in a situation of danger: in
relation to his own balance, but even more so in relation to his social insertion. By the doors
closing on him, Journiac pays for this provocation day after day.

Deeply present in Journiac's work, risk is inherent in Gina Pane's events, since the very first
Projets de silence (1970), and especially after Escalade sanglante (1971), a studio work for which the
artist climbed, with bare feet and hands, a ladder-object with cutting edges. This was followed by
actions in which danger played an ever more important role: Sang, lait chaud (1972), Transfert
(1973), Psych (1974), and Le cas n. 2 sur le ring (1976).

Every body action by Gina Pane aims at emphasizing, to denounce them and to correct them,
certain determinisms, according to which each day is identical to the preceding one and which
contribute to the throwing of man toward a fate of self-mutilation and destruction. In order to
restrain this fall, Gina Pane does not take shelter in the abstraction of great philosophical
chimeras, but on the contrary, she takes life in its most daily aspect, that of the banal fact through
which great mutations take place, precisely because its anodyne habitual character conceals all
the pernicious and determinant sides it carries. To be able to reach a state of discomfort, Gina
Pane disarranges certain familiar mechanisms, like swallowing half a pound of rotten minced
meat while watching television news in an intentionally uncomfortable position; alternately
wounding herself with a razor blade and playing with a tennis ball; gargling endlessly with milk
until blood mixes with the spit liquid; crushing glass with her mouth, or breaking a sheet of glass
with her body. The meaning of the body act is channeled by the effects of the perturbing
phenomena she creates when doing violence to herself. The wounds, burnings, lacerations of
blood vessels, and biological disorder the artist inflicts on herself reveal and generate on the
rebound in the spectator's mind a state of discomfort that allows him to apprehend a certain
behavior whose cause is at the same time revealed to him. Gina Pane ill-treats herself in order to
make one feel that violence is a daily fact, a way of denying both man and life, just as it is proved
by torture, war, road accidents, or deportation because of one's beliefs, and so on; on another
level, she swallows rotten meat, laps milk like a dog, licks splinters of glass mixed with mint and
milk to show the role played by our nutritional and therefore affective impulses. During the
whole action Gina Pane does not give the spectator a break. By her suffering, her risking, she
disrupts his indifference and hostility, she channels his repulsion, making him aware of what they
carry. Here, the body is projected as the conscience of the self. It is pure thought, an intellectual
'$
and sensitive analysis. Put in the right condition by several months of theoretical preparation
(notes, sketches, reading, and daily practice of existence), as well as by a physical preparation
(swallowing rotten minced meat, prolonged standing over lit candles, physical tension), the body,
having become a thinking and suffering matter, transforms itself into a coadjutant of thought.

Self-imposed pain by artists like Acconci, Burden, or Pane has produced a strong echo in
several Western artists, such as Jan Mloch, Petr tembera, and Marina Abramovi/Ulay.

In 1972 Petr tembera started his first actions in physical endurance: progressively increasing
the number of days without eating, drinking, or sleeping; studying his muscular resistance by
contracting his neck and face muscles; or grafting a rose onto his arm, an operation that gave him
an infection.

On the other hand Jan MIoch's actions are generally of a symbolic character. However, pain
and risk are often present in his work: in 1974 he pricked his whole body with a needle so that the
sun's rays could penetrate it better; also in 1974 he hung from a steel beam, his wrists and ankles
tied with a rope.

Since 1975 Marina Abramovi and Ulay have engaged in a series of actions in which pain and
risk are largely present, as, for example, in a performance presented in Venice in July 1976. In an
empty room two naked bodies clashed frontally, full speed and over and over again. In another
action they are back to back attached by their hair.

We could mention many other works, by Barry Le Va or Mike Parr, by Terry Fox, Ben Vautier,
or Pinoncelli, which represent danger for the artist, as when Barry Le Va ran over the same
straight line for one hour and forty-three minutes, in Velocity Piece (1969); when Ben Vautier hit
his head against a wall (1970), as well as in several actions in which he exposed himself to the
audience's aggressiveness and reactions; just as Beuys did many times since 1963; when Pinoncelli,
armed with a water pistol, shot red paint at Andr Malraux during an official party; when he set
fire to his own clothes during a street action, or was thrown into the water in the port of Nice,
closed in a bag, tied and ballasted ( Hommage Monte-Cristo, 1974); or when, shortly afterward, he
attacked a bank, armed with a sawed-off rifle loaded with blanks.

The risk of infection, of poisoning, of a bad wound, of a heart attack, of psychic disorder, or
of death, and also the constant provocation of the social structures, which react with rejection,
such are some of the main risks run by artists since 1969.

One may question the meaning of such practices and wonder whether the game is worth it. A
number of authors, like Georges Bataille in his search for the sacred and Antonin Artaud in his
desperate attempt to give back to the theatre its primary cathartic function, show us the way.
Depth psychology, psychoanalysis, and especially the work of Paul Schindler give us a better
insight. In fact, Schindler, in The Image of the Body (1935), wrote "Moral laws cannot be applied to
human beings but through their bodies. So that moral phenomena are also tightly associated with
the images of the body. To say that one never suffers alone is not a simple clich. The laws of
identification and of communication between images of the body make one's suffering and pain
everybody's affair." Schindler defines his thought by adding:

The fact that the image of the other's body is kept, constructed, elaborated is the sign,
the signal, the symbol of the value of personality. Thus, psychology of the image of the
body could lead to an ethical and moral system. Pain, joy, destruction, mutilation, death
concern all those who approach them, but there is a magic link which unites the closer to
the more distant, and which, therefore, extends up to the animal, the plant and inanimate
nature.

'%
It is at this level of thought that one must find an answer to so much suffering, violence, risk.

Helmut Schober:

Danger is present in my works just by chance, as, for instance, in The Glass Piece (1977) at
Documenta 6. Personally, I do not see why the artist should expose himself to danger. As far as I
am concerned, art is not a form of self-punishment, at the most it could be considered a warning
bell for society. The Glass Piece was an act of liberation for me. For the destruction of the sheets of
glass within which I was enclosed, I used a metal sphere attached to a wire held by my mouth. By
moving my head, I kept hitting the sphere against the two sheets of glass until they shattered. I
used the mouth as the privileged zone that is synchronic with thought, intending to say that
liberation takes place guided by thought and not only by means of the body.

COUM Transmission:

My interest in putting myself into unpleasant or risk situations is various, as is all my work in
COUM. First, I use it as a means of deconditioning myself psychologically. I believe all bodily and
all erotic functions of the human being, both male and female, are both natural and interesting. I
hate shame. Anything I found myself a thinking about and that I was not sure I could do in public
or private without feelings of embarrassment or self-consciousness, I put into an action to test
myself. Doing these things in actions gives me a deadline when I must face up to my obsessions
and fears. So also in public I am giving witness to my beliefs. I believe it should be possible to
make love in public (not necessary but possible), therefore I make love in public, once I have
done this once it holds no interest for me, I have proved I can do it. With pain and danger it is
the same. I wonder about something, I therefore do it. I do not believe in voyeurism by myself, so
if a thing interests me I believe I have to do that thing in order not to be merely masturbating
intellectually. I also like always to have an element of difficulty and the unknown in my actions or
I get bored, so I include risks, pain to keep me alert and increase the tension of a piece by the
underlying feeling of minimal control shared with spectators.

The other thing that fascinates me is the blurring of the definition between real and
manufactured pain and horror created largely by TV and newspapers. We get bodies on the news
in some distant war, riots, followed by pretend bodies in a cowboy film, followed by
advertisements. They are all presented in the same dimension and are therefore very hard to
perceive separately. In actions I initiate tasks of real pain that are overshadowed by theatrical
tricks that look more real, more bloody. For example, I drink a pint of milk, a pint of blood, a pint
of urine that I have passed in front of spectators, my foot rests on a bed of nails that are sinking
into my foot, but the spectators have forgotten that because they are focused on the obvious
taboo of drinking urine. I will insert unsterilized needles into my veins, this shocks but I leave
them there so long that people forget that they are real and causing pain; they see them very
quickly as decoration. So I use the real and the trick to provoke a question of response and
manipulation of response. I get no masochistic pleasure from my risks, but I get the satisfaction of
facing up to my fears and relinquishing inherited and to me false taboos and neuroses in a way
that offers a system of revelation and education to a percentage of bystanders.
'&

PETER GORSEN

The Return of Existentialism in Performance Art

The history of Abstract Expressionist art has been linked to developments in existentialist
philosophy. According to the author of this essay recent performance art represents a return to
existentialist values and preoccupations. These include the reemergence of a degree of general
skepticism, a mood of crisis, a tendency to imitate alienated behavior, and a "paradoxical claim to self
experience based on 'we,' all of which combine to bring "performance philosophy close to the
existentialist constructions of Kierkegaard, right down to Jaspers and Sartre.

In order to reveal the relationship between performance art and existentialist philosophy, the
author cites the performance-type works of several artists including Allan Kaprow, Laurie Anderson,
Gina Pane, Hermann Nitsch, and others. The author is a lecturer at the Hochschule der angewandte
Kunst in Vienna and is the author of Das Prinzip obszn, Kunst, Pornographie und
Gesellschaft.

Looking back on twenty years of performance art, we can now be quite sure that here is no
uniformly new style that we have to rack our brains over before assigning it to its right place in
the history of modern art. If we leave aside narrow journalistic labels like "Happening,"
"Aktionismus," "living art," "body art," "performance," and so forth, we find ourselves confronted
much more with an existential attitude to perceived reality, the philosophical bare bones of which
were already visible in the 1950s through Cage and Kaprow, whose ritual, once again, is not
something in isolation but is to be viewed as steps in a continual process of overstepping the
aesthetic mark. The basic idea of this overstepping the mark is the relating of art to the cohesion of
life, to the preexistence of art in empirical everyday terms, whose historical figure at any given
time has produced totally opposite interpretations on the meaning and aims of this relating. The
Soviet cultural revolution, whose theory can be reconstructed in the writings of Arvatov,
Eisenstein, Mayakovsky, and Tretyakov, gave this relating, as is known, a different political content
from the European antiart movement in Dadaism and in Marcel Duchamp. Here, there is neither
any intention to put forward some avant-garde academic theory nor is any attempt made to
impart doubtful respectability to the performance movement through forerunners in the history
of art. Rather it is a necessarily brief sketch of a change in attitude, of a shift in artistic perception
and interest. It is for others to think of justifying performance as art. The art market and the
performance artists who make themselves dependent on it make every effort to convert the
progressive assessment of the performance movement as something of intrinsic value into
marketable "art" forms or substitutes for the same.

But the political relating of art to life has failed time and time again: in Soviet Russia, in the
Weimar Republic, and more recently in Paris, in May 1968, when, for example, Jean Jacques
Lebel put his aesthetic equipment at the disposal of those fighting their daily battles at the
barricades. As is known, many intellectuals at that time celebrated the translation of that
scandalous protest into political action, defending the "lost" autonomy of living art as a new hope
for self-organization to meet human needsLefebvre and Marcuse had given the protest
publicity. Now, toward the end of the 1970s, there seems to be nothing left of that hope. This can
be seen in the broken, agnostic expression of today's living art, which has been robbed of its
political basis, and therefore in many ways looks like a new edition of the existentialist and
existentially philosophical reduction to experience of oneself, of a way of thought going back to
the 1930s.

There is something striking about the unsymbolic reflection on one's own corporeality and its
nonverbal language, on the aesthetics of an unseemingly unconditional "naked existence"
(Sartre), which shows similarities with the modern "I am in my body" tautology, and, in connection
''
with this, the determined stand against declarations that crop up to assert the claims of the
scientific approach, of finality, and of exclusiveness. Thus, as early as 1931, Karl Jaspers explained
the skepticism of existentialist self experience vis--vis the "typically modem sciences," stating that
the latter "with their absolutist attitude presume fully to recognize the being of man, and to
condemn it as a hopeless substitute for philosophy."
1


Marxism, psychoanalysis, and racial theory, above all, were for him, in their universal
assertiveness, brutal models of a fully defined humanity about which there was nothing left to be
said. Creative "man, however, who is able to be spontaneous, rebels against being regarded as a
mere abstract result."
2
For he wishes to understand himself and the possibility of his own
realization. This need today, now that the limitations of progress and the domination of nature
have become clearer, has grown even stronger and comes to the fore with all the irrational
impetus of the disappointment following the failure of the protest movement of the 1960s.

What makes the subjective-thinker type of the performance movement so close to the
existentialist attitude here is his critical rejection of man as a "mere result," of his spontaneity
being manipulated by economic, scientific, and technological norms. The formal determination
of performance art in accordance with the real, open spatial and temporal character of
experience as a process and the renunciation of the closed autonomous work-of-art type are
above all the expression of the same distrust toward a result ridden, conclusion-bound systematic
type of thought that, in apparently irrefutable scientific form, interprets and programs personal
and spontaneous life cohesion and experience.

It is no coincidence that the presence of a return to existentialist attitudes should be so
favorable, for, as in the 1930s, skepticism and a mood of crisis, as opposed to reason, rationality,
progress, and technical enlightenment as the dominant meaningful factors in the capitalist
system, are making themselves noticeable.

This skepticism reacts with a deeply abrasive interest in the phenomena of illness, madness,
crises of identity, the psychiatrization of living conditions, alienation, and the removal of all
meaning from human communication. The performance movement has adopted this crisis
material, this perversion of progress, whole, in order to imitate the civilizatory process in detailed,
often dramatic form. This speaks, above all, for its authenticity. We wonder only with what
intention it adapts itself so thoroughly to the process of alienation of civilization. And here the
greatest caution should be exercised toward the current optimistic conviction of the exhibition
makers that performance art would "investigate and liberate those very ways of behaving that,
under everyday conditions, are disguised by conventions and only recognizable in rudimentary form,
although nevertheless present in man."
3


Critical analysis of individual performances reveals, rather, the tendency to imitate the
alienated conventional behavior and experiences springing from everyday life with irrational
directness. Very often this is a descriptive, mostly overdifferentiated presentation of something
found in everyday life, at the same time without there being any question of changing it or
acquiring it in an emancipator manner, or showing it up in an alternative perspective. Looking at
them charitably, the "concepts in performance" are, moreover, to be interpreted as synthesization
of the presentation or staging of life unlived. Even more often we are concerned with
intensification and aestheticization of everyday life experienced as something aggressive and
destructive, which are manifested in the body mutilation of so many actions and performances.

It all looks as though in the 1970s and the 1980s we are moving toward a new irrationalism
and intuitionism, and as though the presentation ritual of the inner stream of consciousness, of
the body-environment relationship experiences, which have already been a subject in the
philosophy of life and existence since the turn of the century, are going to occupy a most
important place in art. The illustrative function of traditional art will, to an increasing extent, be
'(
declared superseded by the empathetic function of living art. The "performer" of living art offers
the beholder empathy in an everyday situation that he has himself experiencedin the hope that
this self-presentation will bring about communication or interaction.

If many performers (such as Reindeer Werk, Brisley, Gerz, Lebel, Paik, Vostell, Export,
Weibel, Abramovi-Ulay) emphasize the "social aspect" of their work, this means that they place
their trust in communication with the other person through the confirmation and experience of one's
own self in its temporal existence. The performance, which is always "self-performance" up to the
limits of presumption, offers the possibility "that people will be reminded of themselves" (Jochen
Gerz). The communicative (egotranscendent) value of the reminder is emphasized by the artists
in unison.
4
They see their performances as referring less to the moment than to recollection, as
aiming more at the achievement of a we" than of an "I" identity. This paradoxical claim to self-
experience based on "we" brings performance philosophy close to the existentialist constructions
of Kierkegaard, right down to Jaspers and Sartre.

The person presenting the performance experiences himself as pars pro toto (taking the place) of
a whole that has previously been lived existentially, and for which he, as a mimic, a magicianand not as a
reconstructing historianhas taken on the job of midwife. He wants to illustrate, on a meta (physical)-
linguistic, existential plane, what "we" experience as negative, in what respect "we" suffer, or, more rarely, in
what "we" are happy and are able to evade self-alienation in discursive thinking.

How often are there religious, ecstatic, suffering and Christ-attitudes in the performance
movement
5
already found in the Viennese Aktionismus
6
with Brus, Nitsch, and Gina Pane, or, in
extreme form, in Chris Burden's "self-punishing events," which depict essential "borderline
situations" of man, such as fear and death?
7


The living of life made stageable through performances is certainly not a naturalistic
repetition of everyday events but their symbolic interpretation, to which Schober expressly
pointed in his works.
8
Nevertheless, because of the extension of space and time, of the character
of an open trial of each performance, it is logical to define the latter as an acted repetition and
imitation of a real happening, of a real experience in time. The performance is always then
visualization of this awareness of time, whether it is to be classified individually as focused on
presentation or media or as referred to a concept or body. These partial definitions, which stem
from the reconstruction of the history of performance, always have as the formal essence of their
staging the "modified presentation" (Husserl) of temporal extension. The existentially
experienced moment, and with it an "emotional motif stemming from one's own biography,"
which one "would not like to allow to be engulfed," is decisive. Laurie Anderson holds the
condensed, essential moment to be the most important. This moment is to the fleeting time of
consciousness as a soup cube is to the soup. It gives the everyday person, Anderson, the certainty
of being wholly with herself, "in maximum proximity to my life."
9
James Barth lets consciousness
appear in three individuals, or solo parts, who speak fragmentary, overlapping lines and are shown
in the sequel together: that is, under an I-consciousness, as a subtotal.
10
The formal functioning of
intentional temporal consciousness cannot be better reproduced than was attempted to do here.
With Kaprow, too, the staging of everyday events has the character of a temporal happening, the
contents of which are filled up in his "frames of mind" (1976) by ten groups of three persons
each.
11


If, in explanations of artists, so much is said about the rhythm and meter of temporal experience,
and the pendulum (as in the case of Schober) is so often used for the sensitization of the
temporal experience, if repetitions of short or very short periods of time through echoes and
body reflexes (as in the case of Julia Heyward) make it possible firmly to grasp the passing of
time, then all these point to the nonillusory, Dionysiac, temporal being of performance.

')
If the early performance movement in the manifestations of Fluxus and Aktionismus is still of
interest in its provocative or critical confrontation with depraved civilization, it would seem that
today pride of place is occupied by the realization and exhibition of a superindividual temporal
experience, and with it the setting up of an intuitive framework within which existential
illumination within a group, a community, or a sect can take place. What happens here as the
new aesthetics of existence, and seeks to suppress the aesthetic illusion, exceeds traditional aesthetic
bounds and classifications in terms of dancing, theatre, or films, once again drawing closer to that
heterogeneous totality of experience that we know from everyday life. Does this mean that we ace
about to witness the relating of art to life? Historic memories of Meyerhold's Bio-Mechanical
Theatre, Eisenstein's Assembly of Attractions, and Tretyakov's Biography of the Thing can already
show us clearly what distinguishes today's agnostic productions by the neoexistentialist
performance movement from the revolutionary leveling of the difference between art and life.

1
Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (1931; Berlin, 1971), p. 138.
2
Ibid., p. 148.
3
Joachim Diederichs, "Zum Begriff 'Performance,' " Documenta 6 1 (1977), p. 282.

4
Georg F. Schwarzbauer, "Performance: 14 Interviews," Artforum 24, no. 6 (1977), pp. 55-
139.
5
Jindrich Chalupecky, "Art and Sacrifice: Danger in Art," Flash Art, nos. 80-81 (1978), pp. 31-
35.
6
Peter Gorsen, Das Prinzip obszn, Kunst, Pornographie und Gesellschaft (Reinbek, 1969);
Sexualsthetik: zur brgerlichen Rezeption von Obsznitt und Pornographie (Reinbek, 1972).
7
Dorothy Seiberling, "The Art Martyr," New York, no. 24 (1976), pp. 48ff.
8
Schwarzbauer, "Performance," p. 65f. Helmut Schober, Performances 1972-77 (Cologne:
Galerie Wintersberger, 1977-1978).
9
Documents 6 1, p. 286.
10
James Barth, "Trifid Narrative," Artforum. 24, no. 6 (1977), p. 781.
11
Artforum, ibid., p. 141f. See "Wolf Vostells Partitur zurn Happening Regen, " ibid., p. 1521.
(+

WAYNE ENSTICE

Performance Art: Coming of Age

Formalist developments within the art of the 1960s are found to be significant factors in the
emergence of perfomance art in the 1970s, according to the author of the following essay. Wayne
Enstice traces the development of 1960s formalist doctrine in Minimalist art and observes that
performance art was an heir to the ablution achieved by formalism."

Among those performance artists discussed by Enstice as he traces the development of performance
art from its adolescence to the present are Chris Burden, The Theatre of Mistakes of Anthony Howell,
and the art of Stuart Brisley, all leading up to "performance art's ability in its mature phase to
reinvest the art action with a critical relevance to the experience of the modern world."

Wayne Enstice teaches in the Department of Art at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He recently
completed the catalogue essay "On the Personal in Art" to accompany an exhibition of work by Lynda
Benglis at the University of Arizona Museum of Art.

Modernist doctrine has been performance art's most persuasive influence, but it has not
proven to be an entirely mutable resource. Performance artists have had to work through
modernist tenets and eventually transform or abrogate them to attain maturity. The modernist
aesthetic, generally conceded to have its origin in Manet's acknowledgment of the integral
flatness of his canvas, is based on the principle that the survival of an art's identity and its hope for
advancement are predicated on its ability to isolate and function within its inherent peculiarities.
The most significant expression of modernist language during the 1960s was realized by painters
and sculptors who were collectively referred to under the rubric of formalism. Formalism is
performance art's filial connection with modernist thought.

Prior to discussing the work of specific performance artists, it is necessary to review the most
salient formalist influences and trace the evolution of performance art from its subsidiary
position within the
of age.

Jasper Johns's paintings of flags, targets, maps, and stenciled numbers, dating from the
middle to late 1950s, were a crucial antecedent of formalism. Johns introduced the first
significant contemporary espousal of art distinguishing its limits. His paintings' synonymous
identification with their real-world counterparts stressed the flatness inherent in painting and
challenged the separation between the common object and the art object.

Frank Stella's emblematic abstractions, from the Black paintings of 1959 through the
Aluminum and Copper series af 1960 and 1961, extended the application of modernist theory by
deducing a painting methodology from the predominant structural reality of the paintings: the
constituent acts of making the paintings were dictated by the framing edge. Stella's eschewal of
allusion in these paintings declared the alignment between a modernist posture and the "painted
object." Stella's avowal of the painted object instigated a rupture with two-dimensional activities
and encouraged a group of artists, popularly classified as "Minimalists," to embrace the corporeal.

The works of Tony Smith, Robert Morris, and Don Judd were the consummation of the
mutuality of the art object and the common object. They accomplished this by the muting of
surface incident and the substitution of primary geometric solids for shape innovation, thereby
abbreviating the scope of traditional artistic dexterity and style in sculpture. The vacuity of
Minimalist sculpture provoked the viewer to locate the art experience. This process of anxious
questioning had two results. First, Minimalism changed the customary subject-object roles for the
(*
viewer of an artwork. Traditionally, the artwork exists as object with the subject inside. This allows
the viewer to suspend his preoccupation with self and concentrate on the subject of the artwork.
However, the immediate and easily retained gestalt of Minimalist sculpture deprived the viewer of
prolonged external stimuli. This incited a reflex action whereby the viewer became a participant
as he cogitated on the subject matter provided by his personal state of being. Second, the b
anxiousness of Minimalism urged the viewer to scrutinize the artist with unusual intensity in an
attempt to historicize his intent and process. Art signifying the artist has a long history; it has
notable precedents in contemporary art: Jasper Johns made paintings in the 1960s that contained
a variety of autobiographical allusions, and Andy Warhol was a progeny of the media. But the
unsettling blankness of Minimalism dislodged the artist more completely from behind the craft of
making art, to stress his executive presence.

The inevitable dissolution of the venerable objet d'art was accomplished by the
Conceptualists. The artist as executor, proposing questions about art's nature, was underlined by
the dematerialization of the art object. Thus, as the most rigorous practitioners of the formalist
language ratified specific art determinants, the viewer was forced to seek "extra-art" content in
other quarters. This achievement yielded an art so thoroughly denuded of aesthetic
considerations and so critically dependent on the quality of artistic intent that it created a virtual
tabula rasa for art in the late 1960s.

Performance art was an heir to the ablution achieved by formalism. The art object was no
longer inviolable, and the artist and his ambition had become the cynosure of artistic energy.
Paradoxically, the genesis of art's reinvestment with a life-meaning content was immanent in the
astringency of formalism. Liberated from object making, performance artists had the pivotal
opportunity to as, sess their societal function and develop the potential of performante art to
approximate reality more closely than traditional disciplines. This should have provided the
impetus for performance artists to establish an art that would be stripped of myth and offer an
alternative to the framed experience.

Unfortunately, performance art in its adolescence reassembled the object, and the artist as
fixed limit became the prevailing mode. Performances too frequently were contrived for the artist
to stage an examination of his private physical and psychic composition. The onlooker, allegedly
numb to the angst of contemporary reality, became the subject in response to the performance
artist's objectification. The viewer was coaxed, through sympathetic identification, to perceive the
artist's local investigations as a metaphor for a universal life experience.

The realization of this metaphoric expression was crippled, however, because the implications
of self-objectification were not definitely understood. Performance artists had to recognize that
the conception of the artist as object had built into it the critical capability to discern the artist as
nature. The performance artist had to cease perpetuating the language of formalism with its
convergence on a framed experience. He had to comprehend that the crucial passage to a more
significant form and content in performance art lay in the organic wedding of his art to a social
continuum.

Chris Burden, among the most conspicuous performance artists in America, has made
approximately sixty works since 1971. A discussion of selected Burden performances is instructive
because it illustrates
the problematic temper of performance art when it rudimentarily exercises its formalist bias.

Prelude to 220, or 110 was performed at F-Space in Santa Ana California, September 10
through 12, 1971. Burden was secured to a concrete floor with copper bands for two hours
during each of the three days of the performance. Beside him were two 110-volt lines immersed
in buckets of water. The possibility was imminent that a spectator would spill the contents of the
buckets and electrocute
("
Burden.

Through the Night Softly was performed on Main Street in Los Angeles, September 12, 1973.
Burden, naked except for briefs, held his hands behind his back and crawled through fifty feet of
broken glass. Most of the spectators were passersby.

Velvet Water was performed at The Art Institute of Chicago on May 7, 1974. Burden was
concealed from his audience, but it was provided with five video monitors to watch his
performance in closeup or wide-angle views. After announcing his intention to "breathe water,"
Burden repeatedly submerged his face in a sink filled with water until exhaustion from his intake
of water forced him to end the performance.

These performances share characteristics that are common in Burden's work. Burden created
powerful gestalt figurations under the stress of circumstances, which at their most extreme
threatened him with the very real prospect of bodily injury or death. These inquiries into his
physical and psychic energies manifested a noteworthy attempt to endow his art with a humanist
attitude, but this intent was rendered impotent by its lack of resolution. The spectator, incapable
of aesthetic detachment, was drawn into a ceremony where the moral implications were not
clearly articulated. Hypnotized or repulsed by the tense proceedings and denied the release of a
distinct and significant purpose, the viewer was unable to transcend the discreteness of the
performance. With the meaning of his work eclipsed, Burden was framed in myth. Functioning
simultaneously as a human being and as an object, his performances came
perilously close to having their reason for being based on the hyperbole of a manufactured
hero.

The Reasons for the Neutron Bomb and The Citadel (both 1978) are more mature works by Chris
Burden. The Reasons for the Neutron Bomb is composed of 50,000 nickels, each with a match on top,
arranged in a grid pattern on the floor. Accompanying the display is a statement by Burden citing
the 50,000 tanks deployed by the Soviet Union along the border between Western and Eastern
Europe. The Soviet armament is more than double the combined strength of the United States
and its Western European allies. According to Burden, this imbalance is the justification offered
by our military leaders for the presence of the neutron bomb. The Citadel was installed in a room
that was painted black and darkened. More than 500 miniature spaceships, hung with black
thread, were illuminated by a candle held by Burden. His performance was accompanied by
taped sound effects of rockets and simulated space wars.

These works attest to an increased congruity between Burden's sensibility and a more
sophisticated grasp of the contemporary artist reconciled with social imperatives. But, their
endeavor to address protean, and ultimately abstract, world issues resists a visceral translation and
reduces the works to an expression of nave political rhetoric.

The work of two wellsprings of contemporary English performance artThe Theatre of
Mistakes and Stuart Brisleycontributes a more ambitious, advanced, and pragmatic undertaking
of the idiom. The Theatre of Mistakes was founded in 1974 by Anthony Howell, a writer and
former member of the Royal Ballet. The original group "set up a workshop in which every
member was both servant and masteranybody could set an exercise instruction, and the others
would do it."
1
It would be irresponsible to deny the heritage of theatre in the work of The
Theatre of Mistakes; the influence of Artaud and the No theatre is documented. An accentuation
of this lineage is misleading, however, because The Theatre of Mistakes
is more decisively a consequence of the formalist evolution. In the introduction to their book,
Elements of Performance Art, the company made the following statements:

One of the ways the art of painting has been growing is beyond painting. The art of
sculpture has been growing beyond sculpture. In growing away from each of the other
(#
arts, each art has been growing beyond itself. Each has come across new definitions of
itself and has changed by learning how to change. Only the art of what people do, the
art of action, has been left out. The art of action may only be supposed through the arts of
making such manifestations as objects. How difficult it proves to suppose the action
from the trappingsespecially now that the art of making objects has grown beyond
objects. Everywhere in art we are entertained by exciting possibilities of making. Only
there is no art of action. This is one of the concerns of performance artthe reinvention
of the art of acting.
2


Going (1977), by The Theatre of Mistakes, is an account of "mannerisms of departure." It was
conceived for five performers clothed in neutral apparel with black shoes; the five acts required
approximately sixty minutes to complete. The text and directions of movement are completely
scripted. The set includes two chairs flanking a table, one package of cigarettes, a box of matches,
and a light suspended in each corner of the performing space. Going centers on each performer's
denial of individual characterization - in the attempt to duplicate accurately the gestures of the
person preceding him. The first person enters and performs a specific exercise connected with
the enterprise of leaving. His associates enter in succession and endeavor to repeat each aural
and physical gesture, from the most subtle eye and hand movements to the most demonstrative
urgings and excuses. These formalities recur throughout the performance. Here is an excerpt
from the text:

I do think I'd better be going now because I
Oh, don't be so silly!
Really, I must go.
Ahem.
I do have to go now.
Are you sure?
Why do you have to go?
If you must, you must.
'Bye.
Really.

Going is indebted to Minimalism, but it inflects this bias sufficiently to demonstrate the poise
of The Theatre of Mistakes. The performance is enacted on an inscribed flatbed plane 4 meters
(13 feet) square with a surrounding buffer space for entrances and exits.

The format of "theatre in the square" infiltrates spectator space, and the queuing of the
performers in the buffer space before and after each act establishes an intermediary step between
the audience and the performance action. These modifications of the proscenium arch relax the
work's essential fixity in time and space.
That whole move away from figurative art being little windows into reality, to the field;
and the idea of the reality of the painted surface, as one moved near our own times, to
painting and work which actually emanates out of the canvas. We've moved that way.
We're moving further and further away from looking into little windows.
3


Integral to the concept of theatre in the square is the locomotion of the audience. Spectators
are encouraged to change seats, or even to move around the square throughout the performance
to assimilate the interrelationships of the unfolding gestural variations from a number of vantage
points. The audience is invited only to look at the performers, however. Going does not permit
penetration of its surfaces. The performers, relieved of characterization and dressed in regulated
garb, are objectified. They project the thematic materials of the work from their combined
surface for the active receivership of the audience; that is, the weight of dramatic interpretation is
borne by each spectator. (This is the reverse of traditional theatre where belief in
characterization consumes audience self-consciousness.)
($

The contrast between Going and the work of Chris Burden is dramatic. The collaborative
performance of Going defines a corporate ego and obviates the hazard of artist mythification.
"Everybody's particular personal will, bees in their bonnet, become less able to dominate and
make the work obsessional, and that's very healthy."
4
Burden's work, earmarked by obscure and
repellent pursuits, is contained by a seemingly instantaneous, solitary-image gestalt. The benign
theme of Going is easily apprehended by its audience, as its relevance to contemporary social
ritual is distinct and straightforward. Multiplied by audience mobility, the thematic permutations
of Going generate a fugitive gestalt that requires the duration of the performance to assemble. It
is the disposition of the intent and theme in Going that finally permits its correspondence with a
universal life experience.

Stuart Brisley ceased to make objects and began his engagement with performance art in
1966. He has since defined the stature of his work and its critical bent in relation to prevailing art
factions:

All art at one time or another involves "Performance." When applied to visual
activity in process, in public (Performance Art), it is commonly assumed that what is so
named is a "theatrical" art, which has, therefore, only a tangential bearing on the
condition of painting and sculpture, etc. In this way the use of categorization serves to
deflect a real challenge to decadent and seemingly apolitical artistic habits, e.g.
professional specialist attitudes toward painting and sculpture related to the markkt, etc.
Performance has a more appropriate definition in relation to visual artto carry out
duly: To act in fulfillment of: to carry into effect (Chambers 20th-Century Dictionary). It is
this aspect which brings the term into focus in relation to ''art."
5


Brisley works throughout Europe. His concepts are frequently derived from his insight into
the distinctive cultural nexus of his chosen site, and the realization of his performances rely,
ideally, on the collaboration of the site's inhabitants. The corpus of his work is socialist. His
commitment to diminishing personal ego, for the purpose of frustrating individualized
obsessions in his performances, parallels the stance of The Theatre of Mistakes.

The essential basis for the public exposure of process must have a political aspect in
the sense that it must be consciously directed towards other people at specific times, and
in specific places. The initial concept cannot be realized, until it itself has been
overcome, transformed by others with a collective concern, through the public process.
6

10 Days, An English Lie, Hunger Makes Free was performed by Stuart Brisley between December
21 and December 31, 1973, at Editions Paramedia in Berlin. Brisley, as "the figure," was the sole
performer. A table, covered with white paper and measuring 10 meters (c. 33 feet) in length, was
located between two adjoining rooms, A and B. The center of the table, intersected by the
doorway, was marked with tape, and a rope was strung across the doorway to prohibit spectators
from entering Room A. One lamp was suspended in Room A; a second lamp sat on the table in
Room B. Thirty large white plates were laid out on the table in Room A in preparation for a
celebration on the evening of December 31.

The figure ate its last meal for the duration of the performance at 7:30 P.M. on December 21.
A replica of the meal was placed on the center of the table at 8:00 P.M., signaling the beginning
of the performance. At 8:30 P.M., the figure stood upon the table, above the center line, and
vomited the remains of its meal on to the replica. The figure ate two multivitamin pills, one glass
of fruit juice, 1,000 cubic centimeters of vitamin C, and one dextrose tablet each day of the
performance. The food that the figure would have consumed was laid daily, at noon, in a
succeeding, measured compartment on the table in Room B. The figure swept the floor and then
sat in a chair at the end of the table in Room A until 8:00 P.M.
(%

An abundant supply of white flowers, champagne, and assorted white foods were arranged on
the table in Room A on the afternoon of December 31. The figure, dressed in black with a
painted face, entered Room A at 8:30 P.M. in the midst of an audience assembled for the
celebration. It walked to the end of the table in Room B, stood motionless for a short time, and
then slowly undressed. Naked, the figure dived onto the table and crawled through the
accumulation of rotting food. When the figure reached the replica, and the vomited remains of
its last meal, it stood erect. It remained still for a few moments in front of the white food, flowers,
and champagne. The figure then jumped off the table, walked through the crowd, and exited
through a door at the end of Room A.

The success of 10 Days was contingent upon the efficacy of its images in confronting the
moral incertitude of its audience. The direct assault on the viewer's senses in 10 Days ostensibly
yields a
comparison with the performances of Chris Burden. But, in contrast with the amorphousness
of intent in Burden's efforts, the often repugnant incidents in 10 Days were transcended by a
resolve with sufficient breadth and clarity of metaphorical context to mitigate the onlooker's
aversion.

Brisley rejected the concept of a human-object simultaneity, and thereby the conscription of
self-objectification, for his performance in 10 Days. His role as "the figure" neutralized his identity
and baffled inquiries into his individual condition. Anesthetized, the figure "carried out duly" its
catalytic assignment. Denied an empathetic response to a particular performer in a localized
human predicament, the audience directed its attention to the symbolic processes disclosed by
the funereal complexion of the narrative: the figure vomiting, sweeping the floor, and occupying
its chair for eight hours; the daily procession of foods; the figure dragging itself through the
rotting foodstuffs, and so forth. The audience was urged into collaborating to deflect or augment
the unfolding of the performance by the dormant volition of the figure, the availability of food,
and the accessibility of the sociopolitical theme. "It is true that this creative collective state is
rarely achieved. But without such an intention the activity decays to become one of the more
obvious aspects of decadent individualism, no more or less significant than other activities which
have not transcended individualism to become common."
7


Brisley demonstrated effectively with 10 Days that a personally enigmatic image is antithetical
to the maturation of performance art. His authority in the medium was manifested by the
displacement of energy from his private figuration to the processes signifying the latent content
in the performance. The reflexivity of 10 Days casts the ultimate responsibility on each spectator
to grapple with the innate puzzlement of the social issues insinuated by those processes. 10 Days is
comparable to Going in its treatment of formalist syntax as information commandeered from the
public domain of contemporary art and used as the context for, and not the definition of, its
statement. The physical specifications of 10 Days were based on geometry, symmetry, and
repetition, and its narrative, designed with specific periods of tension and release, was strictly
delimited in time and space. But, the enlarged thematic allusions and the intent of collective
creative action in 10 Days blur the formalist constraints and essay the absorption of its art into a
more comprehensive social context.

Time was a critical factor in deferring attention from the material to the meaning in 10 Days.
The urgency and effusiveness of the opening and closing of 10 Days were distinct from the
relatively inert middle period. The simple and unvarying gestalt of the figure's daily process was
strategic in its reeducation of the public consciousness. This eventually disengaged the spectator
from what was known to what was signified in 10 Days. A more assured realization of Stuart
Brisley's ambition to rechannel energy from the object to the event is found in his achievements
as community artist for Peterlee New Town, under the aegis of the Artist Placement Group.
8


(&
Peterlee New Town had its inception in 1950. It was built in the center of six coal mining
communities whose aggregate histories and traditions typified the squalor and the communal
spirit common to rural English industrial life during the first half of this century. Plans for
Peterlee were internally conceived in 1945. It was designed for the purpose of transforming the
district and to serve as the nucleus for its inhabitants. Consonant with these plans was the New
Town Act of 1946, which authorized the minister of town and country to designate new towns and
originate development corporations to construct and manage them. A result was Peterlee New
Town and the formation of the Peterlee Development Corporation in 1948.

The Artist Project Peterlee was initiated by an approach from the Artist Placement Group to
the Peterlee Development Corporation in 1974, regarding the potential relevance of the
contemporary artist to their management of the new town. Stuart Brisley was engaged by the
corporation in July 1975 to spend one month in Peterlee developing a project and preparing a
study of its feasibility. Brisley's project identified a discontent in the people of Peterlee with the
absence of a recorded history for their area prior to the emergence of the new town in 1950.
Brisley's proposal was to assist the people of Peterlee New Town in the collective assembly,
"collation and presentation of accounts and experiences of work, and the social, domestic and
personal life of people who live, or have lived, in Peterlee New Town, and the six surrounding
villages."
9
The corporation estimated the social benefits of the project and agreed to employ
Brisley for a one-year consultancy that began January 5, 1976.

Stuart Brisley's project was enthusiastically supported by the inhabitants of Peterlee. A massive
accumulation of photographic material and tape recordings and transcripts of conversations with
the oldest residents was put on display to chronicle over seventy years of living history. (The
project's structure did not make use of a closure, so the process continues.) This collective
documentation, gleaned from the perspectives of manifold accounts, functions as a reflexive
social mechanism not as an archive for local history. The reintegration of this amassed evidence is
helping to furnish the residents of Peterlee New Town with an understanding of their
community's historical formation and, thereby, is providing a dialectical tool to influence their
present and future identity.

Stuart Brisley's accomplishments during his residency in Peterlee was not a performance art
anomaly. On the contrary it was a social performance work of significant proportions that
illustrated an effective application of the artist in an area not traditionally recognized as part of
art's domain. It provided evidence of performance art's propensity for incorporation into a life
situation and the consequent discharge of formalism's myopia from the medium. Brisley's
advocacy of a deframed art establishes an alternative to art's customary objectification and the
inevitable narcissism of art speaking to art. The Artist Project Peterlee is a prototype that defines
performance art's ability in its mature phase to reinvest the art action with a critical relevance to
the experience of the modem world.

1
Anthony Howell quoted in Nick Wood, "The Theatre of Mistakes," Artscribe, no. 10 (March
1977), p. 11.
2
Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton, Elements of Performance Art (The Ting: The Theatre
of Mistakes, 1977), pp. 17, 18.
3
Wood, "The Theatre of Mistakes," p. 14.
4
Ibid., pp. 12, 13.
5
Stuart Brisley, "Anti Performance Art," Arte iglese oggi 1960-76, Part Two (Milan: Electa
Editrice, 1976), pp. 416, 417.
6
Ibid., p. 417.

7
Ibid.
8
The Artist Placement Group, established in 1965-1966, places artists in industry, government
departments, and with local authorities for specific periods. The artist's function is to recommend
('
and, ideally, accomplish practicable improvements to intensify the people's involvement in their
situation.
9
Stuart Brisley, Evidence, Artist Project Peterlee (report) (1977), unpaged.
((

DAVID SHAPIRO
Poetry and Action: Performance in a Dark Time

Is there a way in which the essential 'writing' of poetry might become part of the performative
nature? Is there a way of reconciling the written character of poetry with adion? Or is such a
reconciliation unnecessary?" These are but a few of the questions David Shapiro poses for himself in
the following "auto interview." He touches on the work of Frank OHara, John Ashbery, Robert
Wilson, Laurie Anderson, John Giomo, and many others in his attempt to shed some light on the
relationship between poetry and performance.

He identilfies the qualities of "musical theatre" in Ashbery, the "comical No drama" of Kenneth
Koch, and Wilson's use of language, which proclaims action and is action. According to Shapiro,
"the most exacting theatre of the last two decades may be seen in the lyrics of John Cage, just as
Gertrude Stein's dilapidated lyric plays entrance us more than a whole host of more obvious performers
and performances." He is suggesting ultimately that poetry joins the other arts in attempting a fresh
theatre.

David Shapiro is the author of many volumes of poetry and art and literary criticism, including
January (1965), Poems from Deal (1969), The Page-Turner (1973), Jim Dine (1981), John
Ashbery (1979), and Lateness (1978). He is also a translator, an editor, a teacher, and a violinist
and has given numerous performaances as a pod during the last twenty years.

[S]uit the action to the word, the word to the action.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet,
III, 2

July 6. Brecht, in the course of yesterday's conversation: "I often think about a tribunal
before which I am being questioned." "What was that? Did you really mean that seriously?"
I would then have to admit: Not quite seriously. After all I think too much about artistic
matters, about what would go well on the stage, to be quite serious; but when I have
answered this important question in the negative, will add a still more important
affirmation: that my conduct is legitimate.
Walter Benjamin, "Conversations with Brecht,"
Reflections

What is your sense of poetry as performance today? Edgar Allan Poe was excused by Charles Baudelaire
from the demerit of being a poor public performer. Baudelaire said the poet was not necessarily a good orator.

I do think that poetry is always already existing in a polarized condition of speech and writing.
Theatrical it is always already, also, because private language is a fiction. Poetry has had rigorous
practitioners since Mallarm, who attempt a kind of private or solipsistic theatre. Studies exist
that draw the analogy between poetry and "performative utterance." That is, poetry need imitate
less than it may make happen, as in promises or declarations of war. In a practical sense the world
witnesses a variety of theatrical expositions using language. But we are most concerned with those
in which language may be said to use the situation. Heidegger referred perhaps too numinously
to this situation when he made his famous gnomic "utterance" that language speaks in the poem.
One doesn't want to use this problematic to invite a merely inhuman theatre: a paradox
investigated, for example, by Dennis Oppenheim in his puppet plays.

Is there a logocentric bias, in Derridean terms, in the sense of poetry as a public maneuver?

Again, perhaps the familiar issue of whether our culture is biased toward sound, toward
center, toward meaning, may be dissolved by the realization that poetic works have always
()
involved a nonsense element and always involved to the differences (sic), the delays of writing. Bob
Wilson has receiltly pointed to this in his language works with Lucinda Childsas when
fragments and whole sentences are suddenly placed against the background of her dances. The
simple sentences about a lost dog or pilfered pet seem too comical for some, but they help
promulgate action and are action. They also "absent from meaning" and destabilize. John
Ashbery's public readings of his double-columned Litany serve to make problematic these issues,
and that is their content, these double columns: the domestic comedy of an ego.

Allen Ginsberg was credited by Robert Lowell as one of the innumerable influences in resurrecting the idea
of speech and perfmance in poetry. Has this influence been mostly a benign one of resurrecting the rapport
between a mass audience and the poet?

Adorno might speak of this as part of the regression of listening, but there is no doubt that
one form of neoprimitivism is a species of dissent in the streamlined world of commodity
fetishism? In late capital, graffiti are a linguistic theatre, as were the student revolts of the past few
decades. In its theatricalism it seemed to proclaim its impotence, and this was Lacan's snarling
tribute to the meretricious nudity of students. If anything like the benign enters into the
relationship of poetry and audience, one might feel that the an-aesthetic is motivated by an
ideology demanding quietism. Though poetry in its literary aspect appealed to Russian formalists
both as militant sound and as mute structure, the mutism may predominate if the sounds are too
troublesome for the larger social entity. In the West, as is always noted, the main feature of poetry
seems to be its trivializing through permission; in the East, the power of poetry seems to
accompany a desiccation of its sensual or, paradoxically, non-sensical element.

Adorno, has said in many essays that music proposed as easiness or seduction has become one of the chief
reasons for the social regression in listening. Is this same aspect of regression part of performance today?

This is a difficult theme. On this, certain critics begin to resemble a mere form of adult
censoriousness. The primitivism of which I speak deserves a volume in the history of ideas that
would be comparable to japonisme or even more to relativism, that is, rather permanent
distortions and changes in the cultural matrix. The Georgia Review recently (Winter 1982) featured
a symposium that meditated on the increasing difference between poetry and science. The
possible consolation of poetry was held to be the romantic scrutiny of individual experience. By
and large, I think it is correct to say that one large feature of poetic theatre is the attack on "gray
theory." Its weakness would be an antitheoretical component, as in Impressionism.

Lately, Mallarman studies have come under the guidance of Austin and Searle's sense of "speech acts"
and "performative utterances" as Yale University scholars scrutinize the text for the sense of poetry as largely
such an utterance, as a promise, bet, etc.utterances that make something happen rather than describing a
situation. Would you associate yourself with these efforts, and do you see poetry as performance as largely
underscoring this antimimetic bias?

I think it is important, in the light of these meditations, to insist on the Jakobsonian sense of
the dominant. We would then have a less normative criticism. Some theatre will be seen to be
dominantly foregrounding the mimetic, and other theatrical expositions will be dominated by an
antimimetic component. The Aristotelian critic will find himself arguing lessand here I take my
cue from Gallie and Elder Olsonif he tries to see what is indeed the foregounded element,
both in the artwork and in the critical perspective.

There is and will be a theatre of mimesis. The political conservatism of some of it need not be used finally
as the sole perspective with which to combat a sometimes degraded public naturalism. Gerald Gruff and others
have tried to attack modernist purity, but they tend to attack only dogmatic versions of modernism. How much
are the Russians precursors in all this? Is there a living influence to Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky in modern
American poetic performance?
)+

There is no doubt that we are all Russian formalists, to some extent. Jakobson's collected
essays are significant here in both French and American circles. The poems of Pasternak were
chief resources in the work of the so-called New York School. The sense of intimate connection in
Mayakovsky between speaker and revolutionary audience was an invigorating analogue for Frank
O'Hara, who has however been thought of perhaps too sadly as a revolutionary poet without a
revolution. He was, at any rate, a theatrical urban poet of the ongoing city. O'Hara didn't need a
revolution because he had New York City, in late capital's most savage series of slumps, reversals,
and recognitions. In the "no-environment" of New York, O'Hara and others made a poetry that
needed and resembled in part the Russian "no-environment" of the surgeries performed by the
Revolution.

Walter Benjamin delivered himself of the darkest counsel in his dissertation on the German Baroque
allegorical masque. Could we consider the contemporary poetic performance in this light, or darkness?

There is a temptation to allegory throughout this period. A chief poetic influence,
paradoxically, is the antiallegorical in Ezra Pound. Pound said, "That squirrel thereis just that
damn squirrel." Of course, the problem begins for Pound, positivism, poetry, and theatre when
the poets of this age have begun to consider what it might mean to be just that simple datum.
Eliot, too, required a civilized sense of fact for his good citizen, but Eliot as poet concluded with
some of the eeriest allegorical masques. It might be a too easy critique of Eliot and Auden that
they retreated into a world where stable quantities could be summoned in such a referential
manner. But the comical No dramas of Koch, the campy masques of James Schuyler and Ashbery,
and the sound-dramas of, shall we say, Wilson, all combine to remind us of a more analytic use of
Trauerspiel. Reference in these plays is the problem. Doubt is thrown upon "that damn squirrel."

Why have the New York School poets been so unsuccessful in writing plays? Or is this to overlook certain
forms of success in their comical reductions?

I would not question that the most exacting theatre of the last two decades may be seen in the
lyrics of John Cage, just as Gertrude Stein's dilapidated lyric plays entrance us more than a whole
host of more obvious performers and performances. Here, I would underline the musical theatre
of Ashbery's Litany and his two-character Fantasia. The comical in Kenneth Koch has been one of
the reasons why a certain form of theory has overlooked him. John Giomo has created a whole
corollary to William Burroughs in his creation of repetitive monologues that feature an artificial
"Southem" theme. Also, Laurie Anderson's relation to Cage's indeterminacies and his comical
stories should not be overlooked. It furnishes another sense of coherence to this tradition of
phonological doubt.

Isn't there a false populism lurking in poetry as performance? Again, Vachel Lindsay in his strident
public performances might seem more of a precursvr here than any tradition of intimism.

Again, populism seems false, and there are no lack of examples. But the insistence that a
public art might exist without degradation is one of the more constant pressures of art. I would
agree with Adorno and with more recently Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe that a species of infantilism is
always ready to invade this pressure and a principle. The desire for a public art often gives way to
a desire to yield to artificial expectations, illiterate expectations, degradations of expectations.
The best artists, as Walt Whitman insisted in the late nineteenth century, have been capable of
humiliating expectations and raising new standards. The Italian communal performances of
Orlando Furioso, with simultaneous scenes, an intelligent archaism, and a musical, aggressive plein-
airiste quality, are examples of a true populism. The collaborative works of Michelangelo
Pistoletto and of Robert Rauschenberg on both sides of the Atlantic in the last twenty years also
point to a truer populism. Perhaps the C major of such things would be Cage's utopianism and
)*
his collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Here, poetry has received its final persuasions toward
Whiteheadian perfections.

Is there a way in which the essential "writing" of poety might become part of the perfmtiue nature? Is
there a way of reconciling the written character of poetry with action? Or is such a reconciliation unnecessary?

I would again imagine that the reconciliation of speech and writing might lead to a false end
of the problematic, a too abrupt ceasing of the tension in such things. Let us again note a
number of false ways to dissolve such problems. One, raised by Greenberg in a sense, might be to
hold all art as responsibly committing itself to a neo-Kantian specialization. Poetry might then
have as its telos a purity that the very poetry, or mad generativity in Greek etyrnology, derides.
Poetry, in Mary Douglass's sense, needs to have danger as well as purity. The antitheatrical in
Fried and Greenberg has savage consequences philosophically. The bias toward purity leads to a
very impure and weakened art.

What have been your own activities in performance, your own biases and developments? What is the
relationship between pedagogy and performance?

I conceive of a poetry that would be, like Aldo Rossi's floating Theatre of the World, a
nomadic theatre. One hopes for an analysis of the elegy even more than the elegiac. The
precursors invigorate one with a sense of the highest arete. Eugenio Montale's last poems, Cage's
rhythmical distortions in his stories, Boris Pasternak's refusal of all false futurisms, Ashbery's
essentially exquisite theatre of windowless monads, Eliot's own meditations on pathosall this
would be fruitless quotation for an eclecticism if one didn't also have the desire to generate an art
that would be independent but analogous here. The analysis would be necessarily didactic, but
refreshed by a sense of Brecht's famous sign: Even a Donkey Must Understand. Neither do I think
one can evade the problematic of film, which is always already poetry or its sound element tied to
the inextricable image. Film has suffered from its distance from poetry, as poetry has suffered
from its distance to that aureate world of world without aura. I am suspicious of those who do not
see the collected works of Wallace Stevens as fulfilling the highest standards of a private, noble
theatre, along the line of Kabuki or No.

What is the extent of the mythos of permission in all this? Surrealistic influence and John Cage seem to
mingle here. Is poetry always already music as music has been determined by Cage to be always already the
languuge of the everyday world, in silence, in noise, in nature? How do you escape the sentimental
transcendentalism indicated here?

One student has characterized for me poetry as that which defies all integrity. The genre-
dissolving force of language is indeed impressive, as Kristeva has pointed out in her polemic on
Bakhtin. Sollers has also underlined this sense of language erupting into history with meaning.
And, we must add, if too gnomically, with meaninglessness. Each philosopher has his shadow, said
the noble Merleau-Ponty, and so does an era. The shadow of our own time may be analyzed in its
examples of a strong theatre of poetry.
)"

HERBERT MOLDERINGS
TRANSLATED BY UWCH KELLER

Life Is No Performance: Performance by Jochen Gerz

In the following essay about the performance art of Jochen Gerz, Herbert Molderings notes the
emphasis on experience as an important characteristic of performance art. "With Gerz, a performance
is primarily a technique of self-experience," he writes.

Performance art displays a degree of integration of art and political and social activities. This
direction is traceable to the French revolutionary events of 1968, according to the author, who goes on
to describe performance art as "a metaphor referring to a historical and social state when artistic work
was a natural part of collective life.

In describing and interpreting the various works by Gerzworks that are presented by the artist
only onceMolderings reflects on the social, anthropological, and ethnological factors that are
reflected therein. He finds that Gerz's performances and actions represent an extreme form of
utopian art insofar as they aim at the abolition, or dissolution, of art in genuine social intercourse
between people."

Herbert Mokhings has written extensively about art, aesthetics, and the work of Marcel Duchamp.
He has organized several exhibitions, collaborating in the organization of the "Paris-Berlin"
exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1978. He lives in Paris.


Rely solely on a living intercourse between people, uninhibited by objects and
hierarchical structures.
A. Mazaev, Mass Festivities of the 1920s

Since the middle of the nineteenth century the increasing alienation of pictures and books.
These consistently appear where reality is deficient. The function of these media within the
bourgeois civilization is to offer phantasmal substitutes for everything that people lose or lack in
real life. Jochen Gerz's literary and artistic works never deny their fictive character. They refuse to
describe and to embellish a better world that exists only as a literary or artistic projection. Using
the tone of a manifesto, Gerz wrote in 1972:

Constantly, the individual and social needs of humanity are described without regard
to the social conditions which make it impossible only in the form of descriptions. Such
descriptions are therefore nothing else than positive formulations of substitute needs
which are produced daily by the cultural media.

Gerz started out as a writer; his literary origins go back to "visual poetry." This form of poetry
developed a special consciousness of language as a tool, and of writing tools in general, thus
gradually exceeding the limits of literature and extending to all the phenomena of contemporary
culture. The style and the content of the resulting works (books, performances, and
environments) are in strict correspondence. It is a style that reflects in an unspectacular way what
the artist means to convey. Consistently, his works are based on notes and observations
concerning contemporary cultureculture being understood here in a fundamental sense as the
human approach to life, that is, as the way people shape their environment
(nature and society) and how they cope with their memories (history). Because Gerz analyzes
many different aspects of cultural behavior (photography, drawing, television, writing, reading),
he has been classified under various categories, for example, story art, concept art, photography,
video, and performance art. Apparently there are niches for him everywhere, yet he does not
)#
really feel at home in any of them, one of the reasons being that artistic innovation is not his only
goal.

It is impossible to say where "performance" begins or ends in Gerz's work. Performance and
story art are as inseparable in these works as performance and environment art. In fact,
performance seems to be the link that ties together the various aspects of his creative activities. A
nucleus of this can be found in the "Photo/Texts" centering on situations that contain
performance elements or that could be used as blueprints for performances. But then again
performances are sometimes a part of museum installations such as Leben (Bochum, 1974); Was
sich beschreiben lsst, das kann auch geschehen (Rome, 1973); The Centaur's Difficulty when Dismounting
from the Horse (Biennale, Venice, 1976); Purple Cross for Absent Now (Geneva, 1979). In some cases
the museum installation is the residue of a performance that is finished and that took place in the
absence of the public. In this category is the Trans-Sib. Prospect, Gerz's contribution to Documenta
6 in Kassel in 1977. It consists of two parts: a real or fictive journey and an environment. The
following text informed the viewer of the interrelation between the visible museum exhibit and
its invisiblereal or fictivehistory:

It was agreed upon with the organizer that Jochen Gerz make a journey as his
contribution to Docurnenta 6. Sitting in a compartment on the Trans-Siberian Railroad,
he was to travel the distance Moscow-Khabarovsk-Moscow. The windows were to remain
covered during the journey, so that nothing outside could be seen from within the
compartment.

Thus he was to travel through Siberia, the Taiga and the Amur region to reach the tip
of Eurasia and return in the same cornpartment to Moscow, where after traveling 16,000
kilometers [9,920
miles] he was to arrive again at the point of departure.

He was to take sixteen writing slates on the journey, which was to last sixteen days and
nights, one writing slate for each day. He was to place his feet on them.

It was also agreed that there was nothing to be left over from the journey. Any proof of
its occurrence was to be burned. So that someone learning of it later could not be sure of
whether it had happened or not.

With Gerz, a performance is primarily a technique of self-experience. It is an activity in which
he attempts to explore himself and his environment by means of intervening in a given situation.
Principally, the artist's intervention is so designed that the other people in this situation (at first
pedestrians on the street, later visitors in museums and galleries) are enabled to share a lively
experience. The "subjects" of performances and installations are never alien to their location;
rather, it could be said that they are identi-cal with the location in a different aggregate state. In
this respect Gerz seems to continue the work of the French situationists whose dtournements of
the early 1960s came close to performance art.

Gerz's first books, performances, and exhibitions date back to 1968. Among other things, he
circulated little slips that read "Attention, art corrupts." He acts principally as an artist who has
become conscious of his profession's critical state. This consciousness can also a be considered as
the common denominator between Gerz and the Surrealists whose ideas are frequently reflected
in his works. The French revolution of May 1968 not only proved that the unshakable solidity of
capitalism and the paralysis of the working class are obsolete legends but also broke the spell of
capitalist culture on all levels of expression. Living in Paris since 1967, Gerz participated in this
movement as a member of the Atelier Populaire and the experimental kindergartens of Censier
and Jussieu.

)$
The French revolutionary events of 1968 caused a temporary stir in a petrified situation. In
the field of artistic work this meant that art became an integral part of political and social
activities. There was no more room for the old, idealistic concept of the artwork as a substitute
world for merely contemplative use, or as a self-contained microcosm. Practiced as performance,
art became ephemeral and fragmented like all the other activities of life. In contrast to the
traditional painter or sculptor the performance artist was not concerned anymore with the
organization of colors and masses but rather attempted to provoke a new awareness of social
habits and to create interrelations between various patterns of cultural behavior. In traditional
art, market and exhibition mechanisms had separated the artist from the people; performance
art aimed at bringing them back together.

Initially, performances took place in public streets and squares. More recently, however,
following the decline of the revolutionary movement, performance art retired to the gallery and
museum sphere. Gerz's piece Alternatives to Memory (staged at the exhibition "Fr Vernderungen
aller Art" at the Kunsthalle, Basel, 1969) dramatizes this withdrawal. A 900-foot rope was arranged
in such a way that it started inside the museum and ended far outside its premises, on a
downtown street. At the start a photograph was
placed that showed the end of the rope in the street. At the end of the rope, another
photograph referred the viewer back to the museum. In connection with a show in the Galerie
Stampa in Basel in 1972, Gerz was himself the exhibition. For two hours he posed in the street
beside a photograph that represented him at the same spot, in the same attire, and at the same
size. Gerz's performances do not necessarily call for an audience, especially if it is a passive
consumer audience. For example, in 1972 he enacted a performance without any onlookers at
all. In the north of Paris, close to an expressway, he placed himself 200 feet from a video
machine, shouting hello as loudly and as long as he could. Halfway through the video tape his
voice had changed considerably; in the end it had become inaudible. Put differently, the distance
between the man and the medium had become insurmountable.

In Stck fr 1, 2, 3, 4 (1971) the performance was not carried out by himself but by three
gardeners in the Jardin des Plantes who spent several hours pressing grass seeds into a fresh layer
of topsoil by means of little trampling steps. This action was recorded by Gerz in thirteen
photographs.

In Frankfurt, Germany, he used his fingers in place of chalk or pencil repeatedly to inscribe
this sentence on a wall: "These words are my flesh and my blood." Finally blood began to ooze
from his fingers and to leave visible traces on the wall.

Gerz stages a performance only once, refusing to repeat it. In his view it is very important
thatin contrast to traditional artperformances do not contain a reproduction element. In
other words they do not isolate a subject from its original space-time context in order to elevate it
to a timeless and spaceless existence in the sterile, autonomous museum sphere. Traditional art
can be compared to the mythical King Midas in that it transforms the world into dead, motionless
products, just as Midas converted everything he touched into gold. Usually, traces and vestiges are
insignificant byproducts of life. Modem art activities, however, are often concerned with the
generation of their own dead traces, before any thought is given to the establishment of vivid
human relationships. This is the reason for the superficial character of most contemporary art.
Whatever survives of a performance in the form of a photograph or a video tape is no more than
a fragmentary, petrified vestige of a lively process that took plaoe at a different time in a different
place. Looking at such records is boring.

Between 1975 and 1977 Gerz created a series of performances (Ich komm3e gleich zurck,
Euydike; Nacht, lass den Jger schlafen; Marsyas; Snake Hoods 6 Dragon's Dream, and others) that go
back to Greek mythology (Greek Pieces) for their sources and tenter on the loss of the cult
element in our civilization. Put differently, their theme is the mental self-mutilation man has
)%
inflicted on himself by his fixation on the instruments, the media, the possession, instead of the
being. Not only their content, though, was metaphorical, performance art principally being more
than just a formal phenomenon. The practice of performance art is a metaphor in itself. More
precisely: a metaphor refemng to a historical and social state when artistic work was a natural part
of collective life and the daily efforts to humanize life in conflict with nature.

At decisive turning points twentieth-century art has repeatedly attempted to revive the cultic
traditions of artistic activities. The origin of Cubism goes hand in hand with the discovery of what
is commonly called "primitive" art. When this impulse faded in later abstract painting, it was
renewed by the Surrealists. In an exemplary rejection of the petrified objects produced by
contemporary civilized art the Surrealists took a special interest in the objects of primitive rituals.
In performance art the same act of rejection is coupled with an interest in the ritual element, or
the cultic act itself. Art critics have frequently claimed that the performance artist assumes the
role of medicine man or shaman in an attempt to make the public aware of social conventions
and to keep human relationships in flux. Consequently, these critics believe the performance
movement has been able to reintegrate art into society. However, life is no performance. Only
dandies and aesthetes can declare as fact what is really a utopian projection. To be sure,
performance art is reminiscent of primitive rituals because it uses the body, dancing, gestures,
music, objectsin short: everythingto express an idea. In primitive societies, however, this is a
genuine cult, that is, a socially and collectively exercised activity. Performance art, on the other
hand, is a completely asocial phenomenon, because the hunter's world and the shaman's world,
or the working class and the artistic intelligentsia, are deeply separated in contemporary society.
Far from being eliminated, this separation is radically visualized in performance art and seems to
represent the principal theme of Gerz and his colleagues in the European performance
movement.

Gerz's artistic tools are extremely simple. They can be used without special training at an art
academy and without extraordinary skills. These tools include his body, his voice, a television set,
a typewriter, a self-made table, a chair, and so forth. Gerz opposes the increasing specialization of
painters, sculptors, video operators, and performance artists. Specialization aims at the
spectacular. Gerz prefers hybrid forms that cannot easily be classified.

The destination of art in modem society is collection (museum). Two important historical
developments are reflected in this fact: First, art has been eliminated from daily life; as we said
before, it has become asocial. Second, art has become a form of property; we habitually refer to
"art treasures." The collecting represents the victory of petrifaction over life, of timelessness over
history, of objects over people. Art collecting is the product of a civilization that loses itself in a
multitude of fetishistic fixations; it is the preoccupation of a society whose interrelations basically
follow the pattern set by commodity production. "The only means of communication in the
twentieth century is money," states Gerz in his book Die
Beschreibung des Papiers (1973). Wherever one should expect living relations between people in
today's society, we witness a tendency to relate to objects. Examples of this can be found on the
job as well as on vacation, in urbanism as well as in medicine, in the realm of nature and in the
realm of images, in politics, science, and education. Gerz's artistic activity is a critique of this
situation. The only way his work can maintain its critical potential, the only way it can avoid
becoming a petrified product itself is to insist on its methodical, instrumental character.
Performance art can be considered as the exemplary form of such a critical method.

In 1972 Gerz used a stamp to multiply the slogan "Turn your back on the medialive." There
is an antagonism between the laws of genuine artistic creation and the conditions of life under
the capitalistic
system. This antagonism seems to be the secret theme of almost all significant avant-garde art
in our country. The decline of economic prosperity and its deceptive facade reflected in the art of
)&
the 1960s give renewed importance to the conclusions reached by Andr Breton and Leon
Trotsky in 1938 in a joint manifesto:

True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather
insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its timetrue art is
unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of
society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which
bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated
geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep
clean the path for a new culture.

Contemporary art manifests itself most convincingly in those areas of Gerz's activities that
emphasize the necessity of change in the social relationships conditioning creative activities.

Dreams consist of memories from our individual biographies. Similarly, social utopiasas
opposed to chimerical projectionsconsist of memories from collective history, which are the
subject of scientific
research. All important developments in modem art are closely related to the evolution of
science. Whereas the new findings of the physicists were echoed in Cubism and Freud's
psychoanalysis influenced Surrealism, performance art must be seen in the context of the
significant advances that have occurred in ethnology and anthropology over the last two decades.
Thanks to these disciplines we have gained precious knowledge about differing cultures that
existed and, in spite of imperialism, continue to exist somewhere at the periphery of modem
industrial civilization. In these marginal cultures art has not been subjected to reification, but has
preserved a functional role in cult activities dealing with the difficulties, insufficiencies, and
anxieties of man. In his Basel period Gerz devoted some time to the study of protohistory,
arriving at the conclusion that for today the most valuable tradition of art is the one that dates
back to the earliest stages of human history. Ethnology and anthropology clearly have destroyed
the comfortable ignorance that restricted popular knowledge of art to the Renaissance and later
periods. Performance art, sometimes hardly distinguishable from a casual gesture, emerges like
an artistic regression. It expresses the need for real human relations in art, free of the restrictions
imposed by education, money, and social hierarchies.

Art worthy of its name has never been calculated for the public, yet it wants to have a public.
Gerz, too, does not renounce the public, no matter how well aware he is of the futility of his work.
His approach aims at the deepest psychological layers of man, those interwoven with the daily
conduct of his life. "J'aimerais le [that is, the reader and viewerHM] provoquer a I'intrieur de
lui-mme, le faire circuler entre les mille choses q u'il est." In order to accomplish this, Gerz tries
to cause the greatest possible disorientation, or an obvious absence of solutions, in his
environments and performances. He intends to reduce man to himself and achieves this goal
through precise selection, counting on a viewer who shares with him the same basic experiences
and who approaches his "images" with a mind open to all possible associations. Only by
consciously negating the unintelligible experience of the work into the daily concepts and
behavioral patterns of the individual can this experience become knowledge. Of course, those
who expect clear-cut theses and solutions at discount prices will not be able to find more than
emptiness and secrecy in performance art, and as long as the art critics praise this aspect, people
may even feel quite happy with it.

Usually people are afraid of disorientation. They act aggressively against anybody and
anything that confuses them. Yet, confusion is an essential element of human thought. Whenever
old guiding concepts fall apart and new convictions emerge, there is bound to be a period of
uncertainty. The solution lies not with the avoidance of these contradictions but with their
intensification. The deepest confusion is the threshold of insight. In his works Gerz counts on
viewers who are not afraid of confusion.
)'

It is certainly not accidental that Happenings and action art, the forerunners of the
performance movement, started around 1960 when television began to pIay a major role in daily
life. The resulting
banalization of the perception of images devalued painting as a form of artistic expression
and caused an obvious conflict with the picture fetishism of the professional art critics. The origin
of abstract painting around 1910 reflected the disruption of human communication caused by
the emergence of the movies. Similarly, performance art and video experiments are a response to
the even deeper disruption caused by television today. Whereas the abstract picture was a latent
antipicture, performance art is the open negation of the picture as object and material.

Gerz's performances, environments, actions, and "pieces" represent an extreme form of
utopian art insofar as they aim at the abolition, or dissolution, of art in genuine social intercourse
between people. His criticism of specialization, banalization, and reification in contemporary life
refers our imagination back to the distant past, fostering a new sensitivity for the essentials of
protohistory, that is, classless forms of social existence. This utopian projection attempts to lead
people back to conditions under which the separate practice of art and other forms of specialized
labor, as well as the family, the state apparatus, and education, become superfluous. "Life is
performance" is the exact description of the role that Marx attributes to artistic activities in a
communist society. In Deutsche Ideologie Marx offers a statement that is significant in this context,
even though it is formulated within the limits of the contemporary state of artistic affairs:

In a communist organization of society the artist will not be subjected anymore to
narrow local and national restrictions which are purely the result of the division of labor.
Also, the individual will not be subjected anymore to an art thus defined which forces him
to be exclusively a painter, or sculptor, etc.labels indicative not only of the narrow
restrictions of his economic situation but also of his dependence on the division of labor.
In a communist society there are no painters, but there may be people who paint, among
other things.

In such a society art will cease to be a divided, specialized, and alienated form of labor for
exchange purposes. Supplementing Marx's thoughts in the Parisian Manuscripts, one would rather
say that art will allow the unlimited development of the natural wealth of human sensuality within
the activities and experiences of everyday life and within every individual. Because "the exclusive
concentration of artistic talent in a single person and the corresponding suppression of the same
talent in the great masses are results of the division of labor."

Performance art subscribes to the utopian concept of reconciling life and art. That is its
contradiction and limitation. The removal of that contradiction is not an artistic problem, but a
much larger issue involving the revolutionary transformation of our whole life, of our daily
existence and its conditions. Performance art makes a radical claim for this transformation.
)(

Part 3: The Artists

DAVID BOURDON

An Eccentric Body of Art

In the following essay, which first appeared in 1973, David Bourdon explores the then "new art
movement known as body art," by concentrating on the work of Vito Acconci. Bourdon notes that for
Acconci, who had previously written poetry and art criticism, the shift to performance "occurred
during a marathon group poetry reading at Robert Rauschenberg's loft in the late 1980s, when
Acconci was asked to contribute 'a kind of poetry event.' "

Through descriptions of some major, early pieces including FolIowing Piece (1969), Claim
(1971), and Seedbed (1972), and through a conversation with the artist, the author identifies
ideas such as the activation of space, the interaction of the artist and his spectators, and their often
subsequent implication in the work itself, which are characteristic of body art.

Bourdon concludes: "Obviously, body art is trying to tell us something about the current state of
the art world. Aesthetically, it seems to me, it does not add up to very much. But sociologically, I
suspect, it is of dire importance. The frequent morbidity and masochism of body works indicate a
repudiation of certain values that dominded the art world until a few years ago."

David Bourdon is a senior editor at GEO and the author of books on Christo and Calder.

On the evening of October 7, 1969, Vito Hannibal Acconci was standing on the corner of
14th Street and Broadway when he spotted a man in a tan jacket. He shadowed the stranger for
three hours, and later reported the man's movements, FBI-style, in an information sheet:

At 7:28, he entered the Italian Kitchen, 124 East 14th Street. At 8:10, he entered the
Academy of Music movie theatre, 126 East parts of both movies; he walked east on 14th Street.
At 10:23, he entered a building, 534 East 14th Street, between Avenue A and Avenue B. (Following
Piece)

What was the point of this activity? Acconci, New York poet-critic-artist, had determined to do
a three-week-long series of "following pieces." Each day he would choose at random a person on
the street and follow him wherever he went, no matter how long or far, until that person entered
a private place. The next month Acconci mailed out typewritten reports on different day's outings
to about two dozen figures in the New York art world. I received the one quoted above, which was
inscribed "Private Piece for David Bourdon."

My reaction, aside from feeling intensely flattered that anyone would dedicate an artwork to
me, was mild rage at what I took to be Acconci's gratuitous cruelty. My sympathies were entirely
with his "victim," who, in addition to a solitary meal in a spaghetti parlor and a couple of dumb
movies, surely had enough to worry about in getting to that apartment on a wild edge of the
Lower East Side without being trailed by one of New York's most hirsute and malevolent-looking
artists. Acconci has mounted more bizarre performances. During an entire month in 1971 he
waited each night at the far end of a pier from 1:00 to 2:00 A.M., having promised to reveal to
anyone who cared to meet him there something that he would normally keep concealed (Untitled
Project for Pier 17). During certain months in 1970 he invited people to visit his apartment daily at
8:00 A.M. to watch him step up and down on an 18-inch-high stool until he exhausted himself
(Step Piece). In the relatively formal confines of a theatre he sat onstage and stared at each
mernber of the audience- from left to right, front to back-for fifteen seconds (Performance Test). In
the informal ambience of a museum exhibition he sporadically performed a piece in which he
))
sidled up to spectators and stood uncomfortably close to them until they moved away (Proximity
Piece).

Like the work of many of today's artists, Acconci's art is so immaterial and impermanent that
it is known largely through documentary photographs. A great many of these photographs show
Acconci in the buff, and most viewers are quick to realize that he is no Adonis. His physique is
wiry, yet paunchy, practically smothered in body hair, and fiercely pimpled on the backside. Yet
there he is, sitting cross-legged, methodically biting his palm, arm, shoulder, thigh, and calf. He
may look like a molting chimpanzee, but he is doing what sculptors have always endeavored to do
(although not usually with their teeth), and that is to leave a clear mark. There are additional
photographs of him burning the hair off his chest and pulling the bared flesh out in imitation of
female breasts. And then there are video tapes of him performing "sex-change" exercises, with his
penis hidden between his legs, ostensibly in an effort to learn how to move as a female.

People who are not au courant with recent developments in contemporary art might think
Acconci belongs in a padded cell. But he is, of course, one of the major bodies in a new art
movement known as body artalthough his work has also been called "conceptual performance"
and "theatrical conceptualism." His art activities have been scrupulously chronicled in most of the
major art magazines, and he has been invited to exhibit himself all over the United States and in
Europe.

In addition to Acconci, the school of body art boasts a few other principal figures. There is
Bruce Nauman, who has made numerous video tapes of himself in his studio, performing such
exercises as walking backward, bouncing in a comer, and spreading his lips with his fingers. Then
there is Dennis Oppenheim, who stretched out on Jones Beach to be photographed in color with
an open book spread across his bare chest; five hours later he was rephotographed, this time
without the book but with a second-degree sunburn surrounding the white rectangle where the
book had been. Finally, there is Terry Fox, who once drew a circle with his own blood on a dirt-
covered floor, then reclined on his back in the middle of the circle, clutching various tubes filled
with blood, urine, milk, and water. He lay there for six hourstrying to levitate. As the room was
locked, we shall never know whether he succeeded.

The primary source of information on this new trend is the New York quarterly Avalanche,
which devotes its entire current issue [no. 6 (Fall 1972)] to Acconci. Flipping through the pages
of Avalanche, readers will find an unsettling number of photographs of artists making faces,
trussing their tongues, and hurling their bodies onto walls.

Willoughby Sharp, the publisher of Avalanche and the keenestobserver of the new trend, as
well as its most assiduous promoter, explains that "body works are yet another move away from
object sculpture" and that "the artist's body becomes both the subject and the object of the work."
He goes on to say:

It is not surprising that under the present repressive socioeconomic situation young
artists have turned to their most readily available source, themselves, for sculptural
material with almost unlimited potential, capable of doing exactly what the artist wants,
without the obduracy of inanimate matter.

It was my impression that artists have always been afflicted by repressive socioeconomic
situations, but consider what Michelangelo and Brancusi might have accomplished if they had
not wasted so much time on all that tough marble.

"Strictly speaking," Sharp says,

*++
it is impossible to use the body as an object. The only case in which a body approaches
the status of an object is when it becomes a corpse. Nevertheless, several artists have
proposed works that utilize cadavers while others have presented their own bodies as if
they were dead.

Suspecting that this might be the first art movement to be of more consequence to coroners
than to art historians, I decided to interview Acconci to see whether he was, well, still breathing.

I found him in his apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up off Christopher Street in Greenwich
Village. He greeted me amiably at the door and led me through the narrow kitchen, which was
piled high with empty film reels and spray cans of fixative and glue. He told me to make myself
comfortable in the living room, which was rather sparsely furnished: a mattress in one comer, a
pair of black step stools, and an open dictionary (Webster's Third New International) spread-eagled
facedown on the floor.

He talked willingly about himself and his art, slowly and emphatically enunciating his words in
a harsh Bronx accent. He was born in the Bronx in 1940, studied writing at the University of
Iowa, and published short stories and poems in several of the little magazines. He palled around
with that amorphous group known as the New York School of Poets and, like so many of those
poets, wrote short art reviews for ARTnews for a couple of years. The decisive shift in his work,
from poetry to performance, occurred during a marathon group poetry reading at Robert
Rauschenberg's loft in the late 1960s, when Acconci was asked to contribute "a kind of
poetry/event ."

"But isn't it true," I snapped in my best Meet-the-Press style, "that your mother is ashamed of
some of the things you've been doing?'

"I can't show my mother anything," Acconci blurted. The last thing he had shown her was the
issue of Arts magazine with a cover story on him. (The original cover showed his bare torso, from
his hairy chest to the top of his pubes; in between, his fingers poised to crush a cockroach against
his belly. After the cover had been engraved, some staff members feared the offensive image
might deter swank galleries from advertising their Corots and Renoirs. As a result, most of the
cover was blacked out and the only thing readers saw was a postage-stamp-size image of Acconci's
fingertips with the insect.) Acconci's mother did not mind the cover, but she was greatly upset by
the reference to his "sex-change" piece, fearing that he might be homosexual.

"She has the magazine hidden under a pile of clothes in a trunk," Acconci said. "She was
much happier when I was writing poetry. Then she could have books out on the table."

Acconci explained that his chief goal was to establish a dynamic interaction between himself
and\ spectators. For the potential viewer of an Acconci piece, however, this interaction can
sometimes be a bit perilous. In Claim, performed at Willoughby Sharp's loft in 1971, Acconci sat
blindfolded in a chair at the foot of the basement stairs, equipped with two lead pipes and a
crowbar. Hypnotizing himself into a state of "possession obsession," he threatened to bash anyone
who dared to slip past him in the narrow passageway. Upstairs on the street level of the loft, a
video monitor, showing him live, was placed next to the door leading to the basement. The video
monitor, he said, acted "as an informational and, more important, a warning device to people.
They could see and hear me, and from that they could decide whether they wanted to open the
door and go down to the basement.

"I was talking to myself, saying, 'I'm all alone here in the basement, and I don't want anybody
to be here with me. If anybody comes down, I'll try to keep them out.' And when I heard people
come down, I would swing with the crowbar."

*+*
Did anyone succeed in getting past him?

"Oh, no," he chuckled. "It would have been impossible. If I had hit someone during the first
hour, I'm sure I would have stopped, incredibly shocked. But by the third hour, if I had hit flesh,
that would have been the sign that 'this is where I have to keep hitting.' One of the things I
realized I was saying a lot around the third hour was a constant repetitive: 'I'll kill you, I'll kill you,
I'll kill you.' I developed a real devotion to this abstract principle of exclusion."

Acconci's most perverse encounter with spectators took place in Seedbed, which he performed
under a sealed wooden ramp in an otherwise empty room of the Sonnabend Gallery in January
1972. The aim of the piece, as explained in hand-lettered wall posters, was to activate the room
"by my presence underground by my movement from point to point under the ramp." The
goal was "the scattering of seed throughout the underground area" by means of "private sexual
activity," aided by the sound of spectators' footsteps on the ramp. "In my seclusion," the last
poster read, "I can have private images of them, talk to myself about them: my fantasies about
them can excite me, enthuse me to sustainto resumemy private sexual activity. (The seed
'planted' on the floor, then, is a joint result of my performance and theirs.)"

Visually, the piece was not much to look at: a 25-by-18-foot ramp rose from floor level to a
height of 2 feet, where it met the wall. "What I wanted," Acconci explained, "was a way that my
presence could affect a space into and out of which people passed. I saw myself as a kind of
undercurrent to whoever was there. One physical way of achieving this was to be under the floor.
The ramp was the only functional way to do this."

Seedbed may have been visually drab, but it was quite an earful. Twice a week, on Wednesdays
and Saturdays, when Acconci locked himself under the platform, he carried a microphone and
broadcast his obscene ravings in every nuance of polymorphous perversity. One critic, who claims
to have fled in horror, complained prudishly that some people actually seemed to be listening. I
not only listened but also stomped across the ramp a few times, which produced whimpering
pleas of: "Oh, step on me, step on me harder."

As a body artist, Acconci had surely reached a drastic conclusion, for there is no speedier way
to objectify oneself than to treat one's own body as a sex object.

The real brilliance of Acconci's Seedbed, however, was the way in which it implicated any
spectator who came into the gallery. Merely to enter the gallery was to become an accomplice to
Acconci's fantasies, to be partially responsible for all those erotic mumblings and moans.

Obviously, body art is trying to tell us something about the current state of the art world.
Aesthetically, it seems to me, the movement does not add up to very much. But sociologically, I
suspect, it is of dire importance. The frequent morbidity and masochism of body works indicate a
repudiation of certain values that dominated the art world until a few years ago. Body art is so
antiestablishmentarian that philanthropists and socialites do not even bother to invite body artists
to dinner.

Acconci, like most other body artists, does not expect to be richly rewarded for his work. But
even he was startled when he returned home last summer, after a successful tour of Europe, with
only four dollars in his pocket. Currently he subsists on a monthly stipend of four hundred
dollars from the Sonnabend Gallery. The only things he has for sale are 30-by-40-inch collages
(combining photographs, text, and diagrams) that sell, but not too frequently, in the one
thousand dollar range. The collages are documentary, after-the-fact works, cumbersome visual
records of activities that are themselves considered to be the primary artworks.

*+"
Nevertheless, Acconci is loaded with plans for the future. "The question," he said, "is how to
deal with a certain space and how to apply myself to a space. So as long as there are different
kinds of spaces and different kinds of possible relations and connections, I obviously can go on."

As I prepared to leave, Acconci was still talking about the various ways in which he had treated
space. As an aggressive agent he had interfered with other people's space. But in his following
pieces he had been "on the receiving end, where my space was being controlled by another
person.

"Those following pieces varied from six-minute episodes, when someone would get into a car
and I couldn't follow, to four-and five-hour episodes, when someone went to a movie or
restaurant."

I reminded him that the following piece he had dedicated to me included a restaurant and a
double feature.

"Oh, you got the best one!" he said gleefully.

Why was that?

"Because one of the movies had Carroll Baker in it and was called Paranoia!"

VlTO ACCONCI

Notebook: On Activity and Performance

The work of Vito Acconci. which is discussed in the preceding essay can be seen, in the notes that
follow, as concepts of, conditions within, and propositions for performance. Written by the artist in
1971, these notes draw parallels to specific work from that time.

Under the heading "Adaptive lines of action," Acconci writes, for example, "The performance can
be set up as a learning process." It is a proposition that serves as the basis for a number of
performances, including Step Piece (1970), and illustrated here, literally, with Learning Piece
(1970).

In the section "Deprivation, stigma and invasion of privacy," his suggestion that "The subject of
a performance can be the control (or lack of control) of personal information" can be applied to a
performance such as Untitled Project for Pier 17 (1971).

Several performances come to mind under the heading "Strategy and interaction": Proximity
Piece (1970), the performer can become a parasite on the other party"; Performance Test (1970),
"If the performer comes into contact with another party the situation can be one that the performer
assesses; and, illustrated here, Security Zone (1971).

Acconci concludes, ' A performance can be a series of conditional avowals, where the performer
will pursue a given course of action if the other party engages (or does not engage) in another course
of action," with which we associate Following Piece (1969).

1. Accessibility (availability) of person. If the artist is a performer, in action, his presence alone
produces signs and marks. The information he provides necessarily concerns the source of
information, himself, and cannot be solely about some absent object.

If the artist cannot be continuously on exhibit, he can present a situation on which, because
of everyday living, he is required to act, wherever he may be at the time. (There might be
*+#
exhibited, for example, an object that the artist must sometime or other need, and therefore go
to pick up or send for; the object exhibited is there in preparation for his use.)

Generating expressionand hence making the information availableneed not be an
official end of the action but only a side effect. The intention of the performer can be to make
unwitting moves, observable behavior unoriented to the assessment of an observer.

2. Adaptive lines of action. A performance can consist of performing (adhering to the terms of)
a particular element (a rule, a space, a previous performance, another person). The performer
can balance between tactics, selecting an immediate action from his available repertoire, and
strategy, choosing where he wishes to be at a future time.

The performance can be set up as a learning process. When the performer makes a move, the
consequences of his behavior can control his next move. The use of feedback can steady and
bring into unison one stage of the performance, after which can come change as new material is
imported and adapted to.

The performer can work as a producer; the performance pattern can be lineara series of
additions of material and energy. Or he can work as a consumer.

3. Drift. If there is a lag in feedback, the direction of the performance can be changed. A line
of action can be weakened by emergent forces in the surrounding field; the consequences of an
action can become increasingly unpredictable. The performance can begin with an alarm
reaction to a stimulus, when the performer is groping because he has not yet specifically
developed a system to cope with the task at hand.

The performance can take up time as the performer goes through a stage of resistance and
adaptation, developing a specific channel of defense. The performance can continue to a stage of
exhaustion, when the specific channel of adaptation is broken down.

The exhaustion is reversible if the performer can rest, as part of the performanceif he can
"mark time," as things come in and out of focusor if he can pass to another pattern.

4. Deprivation, stigma, and invasion of privacy. In the stage of exhaustion the performer is
potentially vulnerable. A performance can provide an occasion for wearing out his channels of
resistance and rules of order; it can shift into explicit focus what is ordinarily unattended to; it
can produce a deprivation that calls for supernormal reactions in an attempt at stabilization.

How the performer acts, in a certain situation, can be revealed to be at variance with the
category and attributes that are socially demanded of him. He can be reduced from a "whole"
person to a "tainted" and discredited one.

The subject of a performance can be the control (or lack of control) of personal information.
The performance can be a means of developing a handicap, or a stigma, that would make control
more difficult.

5. Strategy and interaction. If the performer comes into contact with another party (another
performer, or an observer), the situation can be one that the performer assesses while the other
party is trying to penetrate that assessment; the other party can realize that the performer's
assessment includes, as one of its features, the fact that the other party will try to penetrate it.

When assessment is the basis of an activity, the performer can become a parasite on the other
party, or he can absorb him.

*+$
A performance can be a series of conditional avowals, where the performer will pursue a
given course of action if the other party engages (or does not engage) in another course of
action. What can be at stake in a performance is not a location (and its occupation) but the
capacity to move more or less at will.
*+%

ROBIN WHITE

An Interview with Terry Fox

If we were to stretch a line between some of the initial perfmance activity in the late 1960s and the
present moment, we would find the work of Terry Fox all along that long and not particularly level
line and at both its beginning and its end. Unlike most of the artists whom we identify among the
earliest to present themselves in performances in the 1970s, Fox has continued to work in this area
since his first public performance in 1969, Defoliation.

In the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in 1982, Martin Kunz
quoted from an essay written by Brenda Richardson nearly ten years earlier for an exhibition at the
University Art Museum, Berkeley: "Fox has explored in his work an astonishing number and variety
of means of evading or rising above the limitations of the body or corporeality: energy transformation
and transference; sleep and dreaming; levitation; reincarnation; music; fasting; religious chants or
mantras; melting, dissolving, dissolution (wax, liquids, smoke, dust); hypnosis; automatic writing
and 'accident'; hallucination."

In the interview that follows, Terry Fox raises some of these salient aspects of his work, discusses
his relationship to the audience, and how performance has changed since it began, refutes the idea of
performance's "claim on art history," and describes performance as "an attempt at a new
communication," as "direct confrontation," as "life's theatre."

Robin White is editor of View, a series of interview monographs on contemporary artists, and TV
Magazine, a quarterly journal. She has written for Artforum and is currently working on a book
about alternative television.

ROBIN WHITE: You'll have to bring me up to date a little bit about what you've been doing.
I've actually only seen one piece that you've done recently.

TERRY FOX: What was that?

RW: That was the piece that you did at the Berkeley Museum last September, with Georg de
Cristel. When you were working with theshaver.

TF: The shaverthat was my intermission.

RW: Oh!

TF: It was like a "beard harp," because Georg plays the Jew's harp. He's a Jew's harper from
Innsbruck. He wanders around in Austria playing the Jew's harp. I met him when I was in
Innsbruck.

RW: He wanders aroundyou mean, he's like a minstrel?

TF: Yes. With a bag of Jew's harps that are made for him. He wanders around with them
through mountain villages and gives them out to people, teaches them to play, forms groups, and
moves on. It's wonderful

RW: Yes.

TF: So, in that performance, I used these big bamboo polesfifteen-foot bamboo polesthat
I had down in the bottom space of the museum. It had to do with the architecture of the
*+&
museum, how . it's splayed out in a fan shape, like a deck of cards. I would whoosh these poles
through the air, making a deep, breathing soundleft to right, right to leftas long as I could.
And when I couldn't do it anymore, then I would take a break and put the shaver against my
cheek, move my mouth, and use my mouth as a resonator and make different tones. So I could
harmonize with Georg.

RW: Oh!

TF: And Georg was wandering this fan shape the whole time, giving out harps and teaching
people how to play, and he would come down sometimes and we would play together and
harmonize. The performance was quite long; I think it was four or five hours.

RW: God, you must have become really tired. Are you still using your body as a measurement?

TF: Yes.

RW: It seems from this piece that you are, because you used the one thing until you got tired,
and then

TF: That's always been an aspect of what I do. A lot of what I do deals with exhaustion
proceeds to exhaustion. I mean, I do something until I can't do it anymore. For instance, a
couple of years ago I played an instrument continuously for twenty-four hours in a boat on a river
inside a tunnel.

RW: So the work that you're doing now still relates very much to your physical being?

TF: Well, I would say that everything I've done relates to the same thing, and my physical
being has had a lot to do with it.

RW: In the past?

TF: In the past, and now.

RW: You use your body as aas a reference, a standard of measurement.

TF: Sure. You and I both have the same body. So it's universal. It's personal and universal at
the same time. Everybody has a liveryou could base work on the liver. Everybody would
understand it. Or, the eyewhat I'm starting to do now are works with the eye and the ear.

RW: Are you working with the ear and the eye now? In New York?

TF: I don't have any space yet. I'm trying to get space and do it. I want to make objects.

RW: You do? What kind of objects?

TF: Well, you know my performances are usually really pared down in a real simple

RW: Yes.

TF: Sometimes there would be only one object, or two, or three, or four, butlike a
performance involves everything I've been thinking about. It is a way of putting it all out at once,
but, it ends up being a very concentrated kind of thing because I try to reduce all of the elements,
you know, I am constantly reducing
*+'
them. You get to the point where you only need to do one thing to convey the whole scheme
of things. And it will work.

RW: Yes.

TF: Because it will be understandable.

RW: Yes.

TF: It's like the Sioux Indians, before they sing, they give a yell. And it's a one-breath yell that
they give, and it's as loud as they can yell it. And in that yell is contained the whole structure of
the song that they're about to sing. And, in fact, they base the song on the yellthe same sliding
notes, the same harmonies, the same pitches, the same changes that happen, in a split second in
ths yell, are carried out into, maybe, an hour-long song. The song is an elaboration of the yell.

RW: An amplification of this very

TF: Yes, the song presents the material in a much slower way to somebody who's not as
intensely involved in it as the singer. The singer hears all those things

RW: In a yell.

TF: Because he's doing them. But a listener, all he hears is a crazy yell. But, if you sing that yell
out, the listeners understand exactly what you did.

RW: So, the performance for you is like the song?

TF: Yes, it's like singing it.

RW: I get the impression that a lot of the work that you do has to do with exorcizing your own
feelings of isolation and deprivation?

TF: Yes.

RW: The art, making the art, is a way of getting these feelings out of yourself. Without so
much regard to how people would respond or what they would be able to take away from it.
Perhaps not so much regard to the universal content of it. I have the impression that, for you, art
is a private ritual that requires doing.

TF: I do art because I get pleasure from doing it, or I have to do it, or I need to do it, or I
want to do it. I do itI do it basically for myself.

RW: Yes.

TF: It's true that in terms of audience I don't make it accessible to them. I mean, they have to
do certain things before it becomes accessible to them.

RW: What do they have to do?

TF: Well, it's likeperformance has changed so much. It's almost impossible to talk about
performance anymore. That word means something different from what it used to. There must
be a better word, we could say situation. I make a situation. The actual situation is what's going on
in the space we're in. And the situation involves everybody there, and there is a blend when
everybody starts participating. For instance, in Montana, where I played the instrument in a boat
*+(
in a tunnel for twenty-four hours, people came all twenty-four hours and sang into the tunnel,
played instruments, dropped their dogs in the water, listened with their ears against the ground.
Once, in Germany, I did a performance at Documents where the people threw stuff at me. They
were throwing candy and whatever they could get and they yelled all kinds of obscene
information.

RW: So, you appreciate an audience reaction, on any level.

TF: Well, for instance, take the opera. The reason you clap so loud and so long is because
you've wanted to participate for two and a half hours! Finally you can stand up, you can even
stand on your chair and scream out, "Bravo!" So, you get your chance to participate, but not till
the very end. But to get back to talking about performance art, I think it's an endangered species.
There're a few people doing it, like I'm doing it, but not many.

RW: You still are?

TF: Yes, and I still think it's a viable thing. I think that the original impetus for performance
was vital, and it's stillit's really important. In fact, I think it might be more important now than
it ever was. But it's so bastardized by people in and just out of art schools, that now performance
has become a clichevery performance exactly the same; you know what to expect, you know
it's going to be slides, and prerecorded tape, and so on. And, who can't do that?! You know?

RW: I know.

TF: And that's the reason it's become so popularwho can't do it? But who does it relate to,
what does it mean? In New York if we go to The Kitchen, it costs five dollars each, ten dollars to
see somebody play prerecorded tape, I mean, it's really ridiculous. And it's gotten to the point
where the audience sits on chairs, you know, and if there are no seats available, then they close
the doors. You get reservations

RW: You can't sit on the floor?

TF: Originally performance wasfor instance, my performance at Reese Palley was in
between the drywall of the gallery and the real wall of the building, it was between the two walls. A
real wall and a fake wall. The space was only three feet wide, and the performance was there, and
people managed to fit in there. The audience took care of themselves. I always figure that if they
want to stay, they'll stay. If they don't want to stay, they'll go. If they want to sit down, then they'll
figure out how to do it, and if they can't figure it out, then that's too bad for them. Or, if they
watched the performance and they didn't understand itthen there's a mental block somewhere.
You cari't give them all that pablum, you know, I mean, they've got some intelligence. I still feel
that way. The spectators may give up all their preconceptions and just open themselves up to what
I'm doing, and get out of it what they can, or, they're going to retain all their preconceptions and
get out of it what they can. It may be something different. Or, maybe they're not going to get
anything. Or, maybe they're going to laugh and go away. I mean, that's up to themthat has
nothing to do with me. I do my best, that's my only job.

RW: How do you feel about political art?

TF: I think the only way you can do political art is to boycott or strikeyou can't do it
anymore byby making something political. For example, nobody goes in the next Biennale.

RW: Right.

*+)
TF: Nobody. Everybody refuses to be in it. And then, that has some effectbut it doesn't have
an effect to put a political work in the Biennale, because it's already

RW: Because it's already been subsumed by

TF: Yeah, it's already absorbed by it. I think good political art would be to figure out a note
that people could hum to offset the subway noise, say, or sirens. If there were a way, when you
heard a siren, to also create a note that would harmonize it, turn it into a pleasing combination,
one that might make you feel greatthat's the kind of politics I'm interested in. I mean, I really
do believe that art is healingyou know, I really believe it.

RW: I agree.

TF: It's constructive, and it's vital, and it's really necessary, but it's hard to verbalize the
reasons for it.

RW: I agree. I think that art is regenerating. In a psychological way, it can expand you, heal
you, nourish you.

TF: I've done performances that went on for hours, and we all, the people who were there,
got so close, you know, that at the end it was justwonderful. It was like you're sorry to leave or
something.

RW: Well, I think it makes quite good sense, then, to be involved in performance art. Because
here is a human being, and he's up there offering, or doing something; as opposed to making an
object, and putting it up on the wall and hoping somebody can relate to it one way or another.

TF: Yes, I try to get closer than that. And it's not just a person up there, it becomes pretty
organic. Butthe only people that this art exists for are the people that are there. Andit's the
only time the art exists.

RW: And that makes it rather special?

TF: It's like any confrontation, it's like a street accident, or a meeting, oranything. I mean, it
just happens between people who met. If you meet a friend out on the street-well, you could
document that, video-tape it, photograph it, and send it to an art magazine, or put it in a
gallerybut it wouldn't mean anything to anybody.

RW: No.

TF: The meeting just had something to do with the two people that were there, and it's like
that with performance, too, it's only for the people who were there. Of course, you can document
it if there are reasons for you to do that. But the idea that documentation is the art is totally
wrong.

RW: Yes.

TF: It's like life's theatre.

RW: It's the energy that goes back and forth.

TF: And it's only for the people who are there; it's not for anybody else.

**+
RW: So it's not a kind of art that can exist for all time. It does only exist in the time that it
occurs. I think that's an interesting thingI don't think I've ever heard anybody say that
performance didn't have some claim on art history.

TF: It doesn't. The whole idea of justifying art through the centuries, saying that performance
today relates to Dada and SurrealismI mean, it doesn't at all. The impetus might have been
similar in Dada, but that was a war situation, an anarchistic situation, and it has nothing to do
with this art form, which is an original way of trying to communicate. This art form has to do with
the day in which it originated, the seventies, not the sixties; it doesn't have to do with hippie or
drug culture, either, I don't think. It really is an attempt at synthesizing communication. It's an
attempt at a new communication.

RW: When did you do your first performance?

TF: I did public theatre, but those weren't really performances, they werestreet situations.
That was in 1969I did one a month, and I just made announcements, printed them myself. The
performances were on street comers, like one was on the comer of Fillmore and McAllister. One
was indoors at Anne Halprin's studio, and it took place simultaneously with Wolf Vostell in
Cologne.

RW: So, who came to them? Who did you send the announcements to?

TF: I just put them up all over, you know, stuck them up on wallsespecially down south of
Market, where I was. All along Third Street. Mostly just friends came. I sent some to people that I
admiredartists here and in Europe. For instance, I sent Beuys every one of them. So, when I
met him, he sort of knew me, already, although I hadn't really done anything in a gallery. In the
one in Anne Halprin's studio, one of the chief dancers, Patrick Hickey, took over and they did
whatever they wanted. I didn't have any control. But there was one that I set upthe one where I
transposed a blind lady from Market Street to Union Street where she sang and played her
accordion in front of a huge construction pit, from sunset until dark. The first performance I did
as an art performance was at Berkeley in 1969, for "The 80's" show at the old Berkeley Museum. It
was the defoliation of the jasmine plants.

RW: Oh, yes. Now, that was a very political piece. It was about Vietnam. I mean, that's what I
thought.

TF: Yes. It was also designed specifically for the people that I knew would be there.

RW: Were they veterans, or were they people that would be sympathetic, or were they people
that you were out to shock?

TF: They were extremely rich people who obviously supported the war in some way or
another. The garden was one of their favorite places to eat lunch. If you went there on a normal
day there'd be two or three very rich-looking people sitting around having lunchhaving their
bottle of wine there because it was beautiful; it smelled really good, it was real quiet, a wonderful
place.

RW: And the museum let you do it? They didn't mind?

TF: Yeah, they let me do it. I don't think they knew how extensive it was going to be. It takes
seven years for those plants to bloom, and they were in their sixth year. It was a gardenit wasn't
very big, it was like, eight feet by eight feet, and I burned a squareI burned the whole thing with
a flamethrower, and it just
***
left a slight border of these plants, and they ended up having to dig them all outit destroyed
them. So, then, the next day when these people came to have their lunch there, it was just a
burned-out plot, you know. I mean, it was the same thing that they were doing in Vietnam.
Nobody would get excited about napalming Vietnam, but you burn some flowers that they like to
sit near, and it's like

RW: But do you think they ever made the connection?

TF: Oh, yeah. Definitely. Definitely.

RW: There was another piece you did about Vietnam. The one with the fish, in 1970.

TF: Yes, Turgescent Sex. It was meant to be a political piece. It was a real, direct involvement for
me, considering myself as a victim, and identifying with the Vietnamese people, and also
considering myself as guilty. The fish represented the Vietnamese and also represented me.
There were hundreds and hundreds of knots constricting this fish. So, what can you do? You can't
do anything about the war, you could go out in the street and get shot, or you could protest and
sign petitions. But nothing was working. I don't know how you felt in those times, but I really felt
badit was because of being on the West Coast; I think emotions were strongerI felt terrible. I
wanted to release my guilt. So I tied the fish up in all these knots, and my release was to blindfold
myself and untie them, releasing the fish from all these bonds. Blindfolded, I untied one knot
and put this side of the rope to the left, this side to the right, and then untied the other half of
the knot; if I got the strands mixed up the whole thing formed another knot, andit was like the
whole system, the whole war was like thatit was so complex and hard toto, what do you call
itextricate yourself

RW: Extricate?

TF: Extricate. And so that's what I did with this piece, always trying to keep the one half
separate from the other, so that finally the fish could get removed from its bonds. And then
taking the bonds and making a nest out of them and putting the fish in it, and wrapping the fish
up with the blindfold, putting it in the nest, and then blowing smoke over it it was likeit was
just like a release, a release from guilt. And it also was personal for me, because it was a labyrinth
of circumstances, you know that there must be a way to get out of it, no matter how hard it is, you
really can do itit doesn't matter if there's four hundred knots and they're tied real tightyou
just have to go very slowly, one at a time.

RW: Before you began work in performance, you were a painter. When you were making
paintings, were you trying to deal with the same subjects or communicate the same kinds of
things as you have done since you started to make performances? What I'm trying to get to is do
you think that performance art is a good medium for expressing certain kinds of ideas that can't
be expressed so well in painting?

TF: Yeah, that was my case, anyway. I became a painter because I started doing itwhen I was
in high school, I had a shed that I used as a studio, and a big easel, and a palette

RW: Right.

TF: And books on Michelangelo. I wanted to be an artist, and an artist, to me, was a painter. I
sort of got in a trap of being a painter. And continued on, even though, actually, working on a
painting was extremely satisfying, the act of doing it was wonderful. But I never liked the product.
And I don't think I ever did *
one good painting the whole time, and that was a long time, too. Ten years. When I started
doing performances, I was confronting people, instead of manufacturing this objectyou put it
**"
out, you put it in a gallery, nobody pays it any attention. I don't know about you, but I can't look
at a painting in a gallery for longer than a few minutes even if I really like it. I might come back
two or three times and look for two or three minutes each, but, I mean, to stand there for an
hour, an hour and a halfin front of a painting

RW: I think unless you're a painter, or an art historian, it's pretty hard to do.

TF: Yeah, and if you're in a gallery or a museum, you just get glutted after a while.

RW: Oh, that's for sure. Whereas in performance you're hit by the immediacy of the activity.
Painting is static, and it's also timeless, it's an object and existsforever. It's more absolute and
more ideal.
Performance is the opposite, it's very human.

TF: Well, sure. For me it partly came out of my living in Paris in 1968 and experiencing direct
confrontation. The difference between being involved in a direct confrontation and reading
about it, say, it's just so different! It's the difference between performance and painting, to me. I
decided instead of making something that's permanent, or that moves away from me into another
context, I could be responsible for the context of my art.

RW: I've been wanting to ask you why you would do performances that only two people can
come and see? Or that no one comes to see? It would be as if it hardly existed at all, wouldn't it, if
no one experienced it?

TF: The answer has to do with a kind of integrity or something that any artist has. I mean, you
feel a compulsion, or a need to do this thing, and you do it. And if it happens to be a situation
where only two or three people are going to come, it certainly doesn't make a difference. You
have to do it anyway, so you do it. And you learn from it. Sometimes I want to do things that are
private, sometimes I want to do things that are morepublic.

RW: So you don't really need feedback, then, from an audience? A lot of people who do
performancescertainly theatre, or concertsreally feed off the audience, the response is back
and forth, you know? The audience gets high and the musicians get higher. You don't have that
kind of relationship with people who are watching? It's not that important to you?

TF: Well, I try not to pay attention at all to them, or even to look at them. In all my first
performances, I never wore my glasses and that's the reason. I could see the audience, but they
were sort of blurred, and I could really concentrate on what I was doing. But you definitely get
feedback of sorts while you're in a performanceyou can feel the atmosphere in the roomit's
usually pretty tangible.

RW: Yes.

TF: My relation to the audience is that I do the things the best that I can; I'm involved in the
work the most that I can be involved in it; I try and give everything to it. And if I do that, then
that's all I'm responsible for, you know? They're responsible for what they get out of it.

RW: I see.

TF: And everybody gets something different out of it. Some people don't get anything out of
it. They're there because it's something to go to, and

RW: I think you really have to go with the proper attitude. It seems to me that most of your
pieces are pretty long, and if anything extends over time, it requires a commitment on the part of
**#
the people watching it, if they're going to be involved in it. It's not something where you can go
spend half an hour and say, "Oh, I'm losing interest now, I'm leaving

TF: But it is. You should have that choice. You should be able to leave if you want to. That's
one reason for the length of my pieces. I did one performance on Mount Tamalpais near San
Francisco in which I played an instrument in conjunction with a small plane which flew
overhead

RW: Right.

TF: I think it started at three, two or three, something like that. And I continued on, until
nobody was there. Nobody stuck around to the end of that. It got cold and it got dark. The only
person who stayed was my friend Al Wong who helped me bring the instrument up. He had the
car. But there wasn't a single other person there. Well, things have just changed so muchmy
earlier performances, people just thought I was nuts, you know, like the first time in New York, at
the Reese Palley Gallery

RW: Right. I heard about that.

TF: I heard people saying, as they were leaving, "He's crazy, you know, he's just nuts." It wasn't
the situation of the passive crowd, sitting there in silence, nobody getting up, or leaving, or even
moving, until it's all over, no matter how painful it is, or how uncomfortable they are, and then
tremendous applause at the end. I mean, that wasn't the point, you know, and there was no
suchno such audience. And I've talked to a lot of people who've stopped doing performance,
because of that reason.

RW: Why? Because the audience doesn't

TF: Because they couldn't stand the audience anymore. Performance has been media-ized, or
something, so that now it's not any different than listening to a record or watching a film, to go to
a
performance. Performance now is something completely different than it was before. And I'm
not saying it shouldn't change, but there was a reason for it to exist in the first place, and that
reason has been subverted or diluted. At the beginning it was very direct, and it didn't deal with
entertainment. Entertainment wasn't a part of it at all.

RW: No.

TF: In fact, that's why at first it got a lot of bad press, because journalists thought it was
boring.

RW: That's why I said that people have to go with the right attitude. They can't expect to just
be entertained.

TF: But that's the attitude they have now. You go to SoHo, you pay fifteen dollars to go to The
Kitchen, you sit in chairs, and you watch a performance that's done on prerecorded tape, films,
slideI think it's part of a larger problem in the whole art world. It's the pervasive influence of
art schools. These things are just extensions of art-school teaching aids-slide projections and
prerecorded tapes

RW: Well, people like technology, learning how to use technology. And often the technique
becomes too important, it becomes an object in itself to be able to use the technology, to make
video tapes, for instance.

**$
TF: But anybody could do that, you know.

RW: Well, it's true, anybody can.

TF: I am still interested in making tapesI've got a real long project that I want to do on tape,
but video is similar to painting, it's the same kind of restrictions. So you're going to do a
performance and use a tape, and the longest tape you could get is an hour. So your performance
turns out to be an hour long. And that's really stupid, you know. You have all these equipment
restrictions. You have a given technology and you're seeing what you can do with it. But you can't
do anything that the tape recorder can't do.

RW: No?

TF: You can only do things within the limits of the technology, and that's ato me, that's a
terrible restriction.

RW: I think for some people that restriction is an impetus, you know, it's a defining limit, and
to take limits and work within them is easier than it is to work with absolute freedom, to work in
this nebulous, nether area of defining everything for yourself. That's extremely difficult.

TF: Yes.

RW: And I think that's one thing that's been really hard to deal with about performance.
People haven't had a clear definition of what it should be.

TF: Well, they should never have one. That is another thing that happened to performance;
once an artist becomes known by people, they expect certain things from you, and
communication becomes difficult. One reason for doing a long performance is thatsure,
everybody comes with expectations. But even if you have expectations, if the performance is
successful enough, you just drop all those; I mean, you'll be able toto go to a new place that you
have never been before.

RW: So, you have to clean out your mind.

TF: And one way to make it happen is by extended time. Those expectations get fuzzier and
fuzzier, and then maybe you go through a boredom or anxiety period, and then that goes away,
and then you can really get into what's going on.

RW: It seems that there's been a gradual change in the performances that you've done over
the years. Now it seems to me that the means are even more spare and that your activity is
directed more toward producing sound. Whereas in the past, I thinkfrom what I understand
you worked with more objects, more elements, and elemental physical processes like water
dripping, and breaddough rising. Do you know a lot about primitive sound instruments? Have
you ever done any investigations into that?

TF: No. I mean, the only real instrument that I play is the saw, musical saw, singing saw.

RW: That's an instrument?

TF: Sure. And, when I was a kid, I played the accordion. I'm not so interested in instruments,
though, because of the same thing we were talking about with painting or video; you're limited to
the range of the instrument. Like the piano, the poor piano is just so abused, you know, in art
performance. They pound it apart, burn it, drown itit's pathetic.

**%
RW: It was a gesture that meant something once.

TF: Of course. But I'm not concerned with music too much, and most instruments are
entirely to do with musical systems; they are set up in certain scales, and they get certain tones.
And no matter how broad the range is, that's what you're left with.

RW: Music is a lot more like language than sound is, more structured and logical.

TR Yeah. It also has a lot to do with mathematics. But I'd rather be able to stretch a piano wire
six blocks and see what that sounds like.

RW: Do you think sound reaches some more primitive and more basic level of consciousness
than music?

TF: YesI mean, sound just occursyou get it, and you can't close it out unless you're deaf;
you don't have to think about it, you don't even have to be conscious that it's actually happening
to you. But it's working on you. I do performances with sound, and it's more sculptural than
musical; it has to do with space, filling the space or changing the space, changing the architecture
of the space with sound. And moods can change; all kinds of things can happen with sound.
Sound can be really deep, you know, it can be reallyn meaningful, reallya good way to
communicate.

RW: So, sound can influence the mood of a person in a spacewhich can influence that
person's experience of a space?

TF: Or, totally change the spacecompletely, you know? In a limiting space, it can make the
space even more constricting than it was before, or make it round where it was square before,
orI think there are all kinds of alternatives. But when I do sound work, it's always designed for
the specific place where it happens.

RW: You conceive of a certain sound which will be appropriate for a certain space, and you
have an idea in mind that you want to change the space and make it be a certain way, and you
know what way you want it to be?

TF: Not always, no. I don't know, in the beginning, really what's going to happen. Like that
piece I did in Montana. I played a very small instrument, it was a food cover that was only four
inches in diameter.

RW: A food cover?

TF: Yes. Ill show it to you. I played this for twenty-four hours in that space, which was a
hundred-foot-long tunnel. You could barely hear it outside, you know, it was a really dreamy
sound, but thisthis little thing managed to set up standing-wave patterns in there that would
just create booms, that would be like aBOOMyou know, and it was unbelievable! Another
thing, most of my performances aren't done in a gallery space, they're done in other spaces.

RW: You like basements a lot, I've figured out.

TF: Yes. I like the floor, I really like to be close to the ground. Or, yes, cellars.

RW: Well, let me ask you something elseabout the pieces where you were concerned with
getting out of your body, transcending your physical limitations. Pieces prior to 1973. Brenda
Richardson wrote about them in her catalogue for your show at Berkeley. In these, you would put
yourself into a trance situation, or get to a situation of total calm, reaching a plateau ofserenity.
**&
Is there a longing to produce in yourself or in the people who are with you an escape from their
physical situation?

TF: I don't think escape is the right word. I set up a situation, I think we talked about this
before, and I feel it is a real situation. It's actually happening and is that thing.

RW: In the catalogue essay, Brenda speaks over and over again about the influence of your
stay in the hospital, and yourI suppose I feel that this is something that I wouldn't necessarily
like to touch on, but I think it's impossible not to touch on it

TF: No.

RW: When you were sick, you know, your pieces seemed to be about the experience of being
in the hospital, but not so much aboutlife and death, death and rebirth, and things like that.
Was that something that youthought about, I mean, did you feel like you'd been reborn, in a
way, after you'd come out of the hospital?

TF: No, I just felt lucky!

RW: You didn't have any transcendent experiences about coming very close to death, and all
these things?

TF: Oh, sure. Yes, I did. But it doesn't seem appropriate to talk about it now.

RW: But does that experience inform the way that you are now, so there's a trace of it in every
performance, in everything?

TF: Oh, sure it does. Human contact is really important.

RW: We spoke earlier about the universal versus the personal and the self-referential quality
in your work and how much of the universal is able to be pulled out of that. It seems that your
physical being does, as you said, have a lot to do with the universal quality in your work.

TF: Yeahwell, you didn't see any of the objects I

RW: No, I haven't.

TF: From the labyrinth. I found a metaphor for my physical being, not my body, a labyrinth. I
worked with the labyrinth for years. Everything I did related to the labyrinth. In fact, my work was
based exactly, almost scientifically, on it.

RW: Really? Everything was based on that?

TF: Everything. Yes. All the performances, every object I have made for six years. Like you
were saying, it's really honed down, universal symbolism. The labyrinth isI'll show it to you. All
the objects are made out of the simplest kind ofnothing, you knowpieces of wire hanger and
pieces of wood andstring and paper.

RW: And is the pendulum related to the labyrinth?

TR Yes. That's aI mean, talk about metaphor! The labyrinth itself is a metaphorthe actual
labyrinth isn't really a labyrinth, I mean it'sit's a metaphor for something. And, so, my
explorations with it were trying to discover some of the things that it's a metaphor for, and

**'
RW: Is it a

TF: The years of working with it ended up in a very bad way for meI becameI mean, it
really was an obsession. It became really obsessive. That's why I titled the show at Site, in 1977,
Metaphors for Fallingall the objects.

RW: I see.

TF: All the objects were metaphors. I had already done the pendulum with the bowed piece
of wood, the pendulum around the glass on the floorfor the showwhen Kathan asked me to
do the print.

RW: Oh!

TF: At the time I was working with pendulums, and I made a big sound in my studio with a
pendulum; I'd had pendulums for about a year, hand-held pendulums and all kinds of
pendulums. And it just seemed natural for me to do the etching with that. I didn't know anything
at all about etching; I'd never done a print, not even a potato print or anything. I'd never

RW: And you don't make drawings, either, very often do you?

TF: Oh, I like to drawa lot. But, I don't make bigdrawings, no. Anyway, what happened is
I got a book out of the library on etching, and I was reading through it and there were some
really great thingsand one was how you could just directly put acid on the plate. And so I
thought of dripping acid from the
pendulum. And then it wasI mean, I really enjoyed doing that print a lot.

RW: It's beautiful, the print.

TF: The actual working on it waswas really something, I mean, it was really great.

RW: So the labyrinth is a metaphor for existence, for the way that life isfinding this path,
from the beginning to the end.

TF: Well, I'm sure it relates a lot to existence. I mean, it interested me at first because of that
hospital stuffcycles of, you know, everybody's life goes in certain cycles. But mine were pretty
short-cycle of health, cycle of sick, health, sick, health, sickand the labyrinth is like a left, right,
left, right. The most perfect labyrinth is at Chartres Cathedral, on the floor. To get in that
particular labyrinth, you move up halfway towards the center, and then you turn to the left. You
do aa little quarter walk, then come back all the way to the center except you can't step into it,
but you walk right around the edge of the center and after sixty-five more turns, then you go back
out again. The actual labyrinth, I think, is also kind of an instrument. Because it's on the floor,
and when you walk it, you make this very precise pattern in the air, and it works like a magnet, I
think. Like, you could charge yourself by walking this thing.

RW: Oh!

TF: It's very long, you know.

RW: So, it gives you energy?

TF: I mean ityou're walking in space in this certain configuration that's really a lot like a
magnet, you know, creating electricity. You're doing this revolving pattern and it's not mazelike.
Most people associate labyrinth with mazes.
**(

RW: Yes.

TF: You're lost and you can't find your way out. But this is a unicursal path, you don't get lost
at all.

RW: Unicursal?

TF: That means an undeviating path. The actual distance from the entrance to the center is
twenty feet. But it's one hundred yards to get there. And during that time, you go through every
inch of space within that forty-foot-diameter circle. You've hit every inch of space, but in a
revolving pattern, continually left, right, left, right. I mean, I think that was the purpose of the
labyrinth, when they built it.

RW: Yes. And now, at this time, have you, more or lessleft the idea of the labyrinth in the
work that you're doing?

TF: Yeah. Well, I hope I've left the labyrinth by moving here.

RW: Well, New York, you know

TF: From here, it's new every day.
**)

CHRIS BURDEN and JAN BUTTERFIELD

Through the Night Softly

Chris Burden is perhaps one of the most well-known figures in performance art because of the
risky and dramatic nature of his work throughout the 1970s. According to Jan Butterfield, "labeling
Burden as either a 'body artist' or a 'performance artist' is to miss the point. It is not his body per se
that comprises Burden's piecesbut his mind. His body is merely a tool with which to pry open the lid
to the mind."

Elsewhere in this book ("Performance Art's Coming of Age,") Wayne Enstice cites situations in
Burden's work "which at their most extreme threatened him with the very real prospect of bodily injury
or death."

Butterfield writes that although physical or mental danger is present in much of Burden's work,
"It is the presence of this danger, the fear of it, and the resulting apprehension around which his
works are structured. The pieces are highly controlled, however, and the actual risks are minimal."

Burden himself has stated, I don't think I am trying to commit suicide. I think my art is an
inquiry, which is what all art is about."

In the following essay Chris Burden describes ten of his major pieces, done between 1971 and
1974. Jan Butterfields analysis precedes each of Burdens italicized descriptions.

Jan Butterfield is a critic who specializes in the art of the West Coast and a lecturer in
contemporary art and criticism at the Sun Francisco Art Institute. Her book about the Southern
California phenomenological artists, Context: Light and Space as Art, will be published in the
spring of 1983.

My art is an examination of reality. By setting up aberrant situations, my art functions
on a higher reality, in a different state. I live for those times.

I don't think I am trying to commit suicide. I think my art is an inquiry, which is what
all art is about.CHRIS BURDEN, 1974

Art doesn't have a purpose. It's a free spot in society, where you can do anything. I
don't think my pieces provide answers, they just ask questions, they don't have an end in
themselves. But they certainly raise questions.CHRIS BURDEN

The energy manifested by Chris Burden's pieces is uncannily palpable, its lack of visibility
notwithstanding. In a multiplicity of forms it comprises a key portion of his art. The energy that
emanates from his works fills up his spaces, communicating itself to participants in a variety of
ways, depending on individual receptivity or societal rigidity. It is not always easy to deal with.

Burden's works function on "a higher reality." In presenting public situations in which he
functionsprotected, removed, and unchallengedBurden transcends, confounds, and
threatens. His private spaces and psychic distances embarrass because they are not easily
understood; we can neither share them nor fill them with ourselves. His inquiries frighten
because they tell of things we do not want to know or cannot deal with. His fantasies alarm
because they are activated. Burden's art asks for "willing suspension of disbelief," for the
entertainment of "What if?"for holding open categories. Pragmatically trained, logically
structured, rigidly educated, we find this difficult to do.

*"+
Burden received his B.A. degree from Pomona College, Claremont, California, in 1969, where
he took courses from John Mason, Mowry Baden, and David Grey. In 1969 he went on to the
University of California at Irvine, where he received his M.F.A. in 1971. The Irvine period was
fortunate. Nineteen sixty nine marked the first year of its graduate program under the tutelage of
a number of important teachers, among them Robert Irwin, Tony de Lapp, Larry Bell, John
Mason, Craig Kauffman, Barbara Rose, and Robert Morris.

As an undergraduate sculpture major, Burden had been making clean, Minimal pieces with
handsome surfaces. Bored with those, he executed a group of outdoor pieces and a series of
"apparatus pieces," involving spectator participation. In February 1971 Burden had an exhibition
at F-Space gallery in Santa Ana, California, for which he created an untitled and still
undocumented work.

After having climbed rather precariously up to the swaying platform, spectators, who were at
this point already somewhat disoriented, were hit with the curious vision of the sky and the crisp
jolt of cold night air, which wafted through the scope onto the face. This piece marked the
beginning of the curious kind of remove that has become a hallmark of Burden's pieces as well as
an odd kind of spectator participation. As people came into the gallery, individual Polaroid
photographs were taken of them and kept, without explanation, thus linking the spectators
inextricably with the piece. In addition, Burden sat at the far end of the gallery, locked in the
bathroom on a little wooden box. A fisheye lens was installed backward into the door so that
people could come in and look at him, but he could not see out. "There was," he says, "a nice
kind of Peeping Tom aspect to it."

In April 1971 Burden began the Five-Day Locker Piece, which marked the beginning of his
major work. The piece was executed in partial fulfillment of his master's degree at Irvine, which
required graduating students to exhibit works in the gallery.

Word spread quickly on the campus grapevine that a piece of more than usual interest was
taking place in the gallery. Students from all over the campus came to the locker to see what was
going on. Professors from the art department held classes in front of the locker, including
Burden in the discussions. Some, such as New York painter Bill Conlon, initiated group dialogues
around the locker.

Burden is extremely soft-spoken, low-key, and matter-of-fact. His vocabulary seldom includes
such loaded words as panic, terror, or hysteria. Throughout a discussion of his works, he remains
unemotional,
exhibiting the quiet sense of control that has become a hallmark of his pieces.

I took most of my courses from Irwin. Tony de Lapp held classesand he was really the most formal. But
Irwin was a lot coolerhe would just come to the studio about once every two months and spend whole days at
a time. It was really good, because it was on a one-to-one basis. He would come by for a whole week, and sort of
do a total head blitz and then leave. You had to sign up for classes, but I just signed up for about three or four
with Irwin; that just kind of took care of school. Most of the time I didn't really see anybody else until the end
of the year.

Five-Day Locker Piece (University of California, Irvine, April 26-30,1971). I was locked in Locker 5
for five consecutive days and did not leave the locker during this time. The locker measured 2 feet high, 2 feet
wide, and 3 feet deep. I stopped eating several days prior to entry. The locker directly above me contained five
gallons of bottled water; the locker below me contained an empty five-gallon bottle.

"It was kind of weird really," Burden says. "The students were all kind of defending me and Conlon was
sort of tying to knock me down, and there I was shut up in there, and they were arguing with the art. I was
kind of nice really. It was one of the nicer moments.
*"*

"About 10:30 P.M. the doors were locked and people could no longer come in the building. That was the
most frightening period. I had this fantasy, though, that I could always kick the door out. Some nights my wife
would sleep on the floor outside in case I really slipped out or something. It was pretty strange. One night the
janitor came by and he couldn't figure out what she was doing there.

"The important part to remember was that I had set it up. I could foresee the end too (it was not an open-.
ended situation, which is partially what creates fear). It was not something that was thrust upon me, but
rather something I imposed upon myself like a task. I think a part of it is you just keep telling yourself that
you just have to wait, because time will ultimately take care of it, that it is inevitable, and that this moment is
no more fearful than those that went on before. The 3rd part of the pieces is always the hardest. Once I have
passed the halfway point, then I am already there and I know I can certainly make it through the next half:
The beginning is pretty shocking. That's when I begin to have all the doubts and
stuff, but once I am really into it and halfway through it, it's easy.

To be right, the pieces have to have a kind of crisp quality to them. For example, I think a lot of them are
physically very frontal. Also, it is more than iust a physical thing. I think of than, sense them that way too.
When I think of them, I try to make them sort of clean, so that they are not formless, with a lot of separate
parts. They are pretty crisp and you can read them pretty quickly, even the ones that take place ouer a long
period of time. It's not like a Joan Jonas dance piece where you have a lot of intricate parts that
make a whole. With my pieces there is one thing and that's it."

After the termination of Five-Day Locker Piece, Burden did Shout Piece at F-Space, on August
21, 1971. In this work he sat on a platform 14 feet above the floor, covered with red body paint
and illuminated by movie lights. When the people who had received invitations to the exhibition
got there, they were aurally bombarded by Burden's voice, which was amplified by three large
speakers, repeating over and over again: "Get the fuck out immediately. Get the fuck out
immediately. "Faced with physical rejection and with the artist's own presence, most left
instantaneously.

As a result of his sculptural training, Burden's pieces have a look and a "feel" that relate them
far more closely to sculptural forms than to performance pieces. From initial idea through
concept and actual execution, he shapes and formulates his works based on clarity of impact. He
hones and molds concepts as if they were physically tangible, discarding those that do not seem
cohesive enough or that he feels are spread too thin. The gestalt must be instantly perceivable;
the works must hold together as a single unit.

Prelude to 220, or 110 was one of the most dramatic and, along with Shoot, done shortly
thereafter, and Doorway to Heaven, executed in late 1974, it was one of the few pieces that
presented elements of very real danger. In each case, however, the odds against the presented
dangers becoming actual were very slim, more akin perhaps to those taken by a skilled circus
aerialist who works without a net than to the risk-taking attitude of Evel Knievel with whose name
Burden has regrettably been linked.

That physical or mental danger is possible in many of Burden's pieces cannot be denied. It is
the presence of this danger, the fear of it, and the resulting apprehension around which his
works are structured. The pieces are highly controlled, however, and the actual risks are minimal.

In fact, it is that terror, that thrill, that anxiety, that makes Burden's pieces impact. The
seemingly masochistic element is the most misunderstood. Burden's control over his mind and
body is a rigidly ascetic one. If there is the thrill of the high-wire aerialist, there is also the
restrained withdrawal of the Zen student or the Indian fakir. His works do not make a deliberate
attempt to terminate life or to maim the body but, rather, set up situations where but for the
control, these things could happen.
*""

220 remains the single aberrational piece in the entire body of thirty-one pieces. All of his
works before and since have dealt with controlled "knowns," situations or tasks that the artist set
for himself to deal with, overcome, or experience. An important factor of his works is the psychic
and physical control by which he avoids physical or mental harm. It is difficult, however, to
assume that this control can be transferred to others participating in the same situation. In
introducing others into this work he subjected them to very real danger, which he had no
assurance they could handle. In spite of the fact that the participants were involved of their own
volition, I think the question of morality must be strongly raised in
connection with this piece.

Prelude to 220, or 110 (F-Space, September le12, 1971). I was strapped to the floor with copper bands
bolted into the concrete. Two buckets of water with 110 lines submerged in them were placed near me. The piece
was performed from 8:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M. for three nights.

People were angry at me for the Shout Piece, so in 110 I presented them with an opportunity in a
sacrificial situationto atone for the earlier piece. Not really literally, I wasn't hoping that somebody was
going to kick the buckets over, but first by putting myself in that position, it was kind of like a way of
absolving myself from the last piece, which was aggressive and hostile. It was also a way of getting recruits for
a piece called 220show them that I could do it and not be electrocuted, so that I could get others to
participate in a piece with me. There was no actual danger, no taunting; if anything people were apprehensive
about getting near me. It was almost as if the buckets were repulsive magnets. Most people stayed very far
away. I would talk to people and they would sort of come up gingerly, but they all stayed really very far away
as if the floor were littered with banana peels and they might at any point slip and kick the buckets over.

"I never feel like I'm taking risks. What the pieces are about is what is going to happen. Danger and pain
are catalyststo hype things up. That's important. The object is to see how I can deal with them. The fear is a
lot worse than the actual deed. "Dealing with it psychologically, I have fear, but once I have set it up, as far as
I am concerned, it is inevitable. It is something that is going to happen anyway. Time ticks by and it is going
to happen at a certain how, whatever it is. Sometimes I can feel myself getting really knotted up about it, and I
just have to relax because I know it is inevitable. The hardest time is when I am deciding whether to do a piece
or not, because once I make a decision to do it, then I have decidedthat's the real turning point. It's a
commitment. That's the crux of it right then.

"The thought comes before the conception. The satisfaction is trying to figure out something I feel right
about, something that seems strong and correct. That part is always a struggle. That part is really hard and I
get nervous about it. Once I have figured out all of the parts and how I want it to go together, and I have a
conception of it (when the piece is actually finished in my head), then it is a matter of actually executing it.
That is the fairly mechanical part of it. The hardest part really is trying to conceive something and struggling
with it. Then the rest is, well, the rest is really the good part."

220 (F-Space, October 9, 1971). The gallery was flooded with 12 inches of water. Three other people and
I waded through the water and climbed onto 14-foot ladders, one ladder per person. After everyone was
positioned, I dropped a 220 electric line into the water. The piece lasted from midnight until dawn, about six
hours. There was no audience except for the participants.

"The piece was an experiment in what would happen. It was a kind of artificial 'men in a life raft'
situation. The thing I was attempting to set up was a hyped-up situation with high danger, which would keep
them awake, confessing and talking, but it didn't, really. After about two and a half hours everybody got
really sleepy. They would kind of lean on their ladders by hooking their arms around, and go to sleep. It was
surprising that anyone could sleep, but we all did intermittently. There was a circuit breaker outside
the building and my wife came in at six in the morning and turned it off and opened the door. I think
everyone enjoyed it in a weird sort of way. I think they had some of the feelings that I had had, you know?
They felt kind of elated, like they had really done something."
*"#

Bed Piece remains the most important of Burden's early pieces. Because it did not initially
appear as extreme as Five-Day Locker Piece, it lacked the sensational overtones that his work
eventually took on. Bed Piece was also far more extensive in terms of both its investigations and its
implications. If certain aspects of systemic questioning were inherent in Locker Piece, they existed
in Bed Piece as well, but in far subtler and more curious ways. As the piece was neither delineated
nor explained prior to execution, it necessitated many physical, practical, and psychological
adjustments on the part of the gallery director.

Having agreed on a date for the piece, Burden simply arrived on the appointed day, took off
his clothes, and got into bed. For twenty-two consecutive days and nights, he lay in the white-
covered bed in the stark white gallery, totally isolated from the outside world, with only his own
internal resources to maintain psychic stability. In its Zen-like meditative quality and resultant
redefinition of existence, which obscured the boundaries between this existence and another, the
piece, by Burden's own admission, came very close to pushing him over the edge.

In Bed Piece, also, there would appear to be quiet flirtations with death that manifest
themselves in other pieces in a more overt fashion. Here, they are seductive, lulling, and more
subtle. In the escape into time suspension, akin to prolonged sleep, was Burden playing about the
edges of death? He says not.

Because Bed Piece was so private, so inexplicable, it posed many questions. One remains
deeply curious about his meditative state, his sensory deprivation. Are they highly pleasurable for
him?
If he is able successfully to "go away" and to return safely as well, the high must be
incalculable. However, the paths to those states of mind are difficult, sometimes dangerous, and
perhaps addictive.
The withdrawal pangs must be ferocious.

By the end of the first two weeks the novelty of the piece had worn off and people began to be
generally concerned about Burden's well-being. The sheer passivity of the piece had generated a
great deal of energy. The Market Street space backed up to Robert Irwin's studio, and, in fact,
shared a common wall. Burden relates that during the course of the piece Irwin stopped living
there: "Just the knowledge that I was on the other side of the wall started getting to him." A Los
Angeles couple, well known for their collection and for their close relationships with artists,
debated personally about "pulling him out of it," but apparently made the moral/artistic
judgment not to do so.

Bed Piece (Market Street, Venice, California, February 18 to March 10, 1972). Josh Young asked me to
do a piece for the Market Street Program from Februay 18 to March 10. I told him I would need a
single bed in the gallery. At noon on Februay 18, I took off my clothes and got into bed. I had given no
other instructions and did not speak to anyone during the piece.

I started to like it there. It was really seductive. That's why I considered just staying therebecause it
was so much nicer than the outside world. I really started to like it, and then that's when I started thinking
that I'd better be pretty sure that when the end of the exhibition cameI got up.

"About the death thingI don't think so, no. It's just that the piece was very relaxing. It is very relaxing
to do that and all the anxiety about everything, about what is going to happen, goes because there is nothing I
can do to change it. And when that happens it is like a tremendous relief.

"I had started liking it there and seriously considered staying there, but I didn't because I knew I just
couldn't. People were really getting upset toward the end. Stanley and Elyse Grinstein were afraid I had
flipped out. Bob Irwin came in and asked me not to do anything crazy, not to let the whole thing come down
*"$
on my head. I could feel this whole tension kind of building up outside. There was no outside communication
and everyone thought I had gone over the edge. As the end came near, I had a sort of nostalgia about it. In the
same sense that it was boring in the beginning, but I had no control over it because it was ineoitable, at the
end I had this nostalgia, this deep regret at having to return to nonnal. But it was inevitable, and I couldn't
do anything to prolong or shorten it. On a certain day I had to get up and it would be over, and it would be
gone."

In addition to individual inquiry, altered states of consciousness, and disruption of systemic
procedures, the majority of Burden's pieces are visually quite beautiful. In many, such as Icarus,
there are symbolic overtones as well.

By the end of 1973, a large portion of Burden's pieces had become extremely lyrical. Having
executed a number of very aggressive piecesuch as the much publicized Shoot, which backfired
and painfully wounded him, or Deadman, rolled in a tarp on a busy night street, as well as 747, in
which he shot at a jet planehis works began to mature by dealing with their extension and
investigations in different forms. Among the most beautiful of the later pieces was Through the
Night Softly, which dealt with visual fantasy
as well as with the necessity for raising the threshold of pain.

Across the black asphalt pavement of a parking lot, Burden, virtually naked and in the dark of
night, crawled his way painfully and tortuously across the tiny, twinkling fragments of glass,
breathing with great difficulty, and bleeding from numerous small cuts. The resulting film is both
beautiful in its impact and terrifying in its implications, not all of which the viewer is privy to.
Here, as in other works such as 110, Icarus, and later Back to You, the elements of sacrifice or
atonement became overriding aspects.

Three later works, Doorway to Heaven, Trans-Fixed, and Oh, Dracula, while still concerned with
psychic extensions, deal almost ironically with sacrifice, ironically in the sense that by definition
the term sacrifice demands a martyr for the cause, and in Burden's case the cause is all too often
misunderstood.

If among the most beautiful, Doorway to Heaven is also the most personally immoral, its
sacrificial element too close for comfort. It is the kind of piece that leaves Burden wide open to
charges of sensational masochism or even of insanity.

Trans-Fixed is a purely sacrificial piece. Without actual or real danger, it is a classic example of
the kinds of situations Burden sets up, which appear quite terrifying, setting up tension and fear in
the viewer, but which, in reality, present only scant dangers for him.

This work, a "crucifixion piece," was, like all the others, undertaken with great care and
thought beforehand. Burden and several friends shopped in hardware stores for the correct size
of nail to be driven though his hands, nails that were later sterilized to minimize the chance of
infection and sharpened for easier entry. There was little or no blood, and little pain. The nails
went quickly through the hands, which consist primarily of cartilage. Burden says that the most
insurmountable portion of the work was not the enduring of the piece itself but rather the
necessity to maintain calm in the assistants, who were to help with the car and the garage door, as
well as to convince the person who was to drive in the nails "not to choke up on the hammer."

Sculpture in Three Parts tended on the surface to impact less perhaps than any of the previous
pieces, but in fact the reverse was true. Riding up in the elevator to the gallery one found the
elevator doors opening instantly upon Burden's piece, placed frontally so that he stared directly
at the viewer, who could not escape him. Unlike the majority of other pieces, he made eye
contact in a blank and curious way, as if he had just been aroused from sleep and found the
intrusion both slightljr incomprehensible and somewhat of an affront.
*"%

Doorway to Heaven (November 15,1973). At 6:00 P.M. I stood in the doorway of my studio facing the
Venice Boardwalk, a few spectators watched as I pushed two live electric wires into my chest. The wires crossed
and exploded, burning me but saving me from electrocution.

Dos Equis (October 16, 1972). On the evening of October 16, I placed two XXs constructed of I6-foot
beams in an upright position blocking both lanes of the Laguna Canyon Road. The timber had
been soaked in gasoline for several days. I set the XXs on fire and left the area.

Dos Equis was just for one person. I do not know who he is or anything. He was just the first one to come
upon those big XXs burning in the road. In the classical or traditional sense of going to a museum or gallery
to view something maybe it was not art, not by that definition, but to me it was. For whoever saw it, it was a
kind of really unforgettable experience. Those fiery crosses must really have burned into that guy's mind.
Sometimes I choose to limit the number of people who see a piece because I want those people to have a really
strong experience. I did this with the Icarus piece in my studio as well. It is always a toss-up whether or not it
is better for a hundred people to see it casually or two people to receive it really strong. "

Icarus (April 13, 1973). At 6.40 P.M. three invited spectators came to my studio. The room was 15 feet
by 25 feet and well lit by natural light. Wearing no clothes, I entered the space from a small room at the back.
Two assistants lifted onto each shoulder one end of foot sheets of plate glass. The sheets sloped onto the floor at
right angles from my body. The assistants poured gasoline down the sheets of glass. Stepping back they threw
matches to ignite the gasoline. After a few seconds I jumped up, sending the burning glass crashing to the
floor. I walked back into the room.

Through the Night Softly (Main Street, Los Angeles, September 12, 1973). Holding my hands behind
my back, I crawled through 50 feet of broken glass. There were very few spectators, most of than passersby. This
piece was documented with a 16mm film.

"That [danger] is something I have been thinking a great deal about. I don't knowI guess there was a
lot more danger in that piece than I would admit to myself at the time. That's one of those things, you know? I
started fooling around with the wires and I really liked the way they exploded and I wanted to do something, to
relate it to me. For a long time I thought about pushing them into me and stuff, but there was the very real
problem that I could get electrocuted. And then, finally, I had this idea that just as the wires went together they
would pop and then they would go into me, and maybe I would get shocked, but the pain from the burst and
the explosion would jerk my hands away and save me."

Trans-Fixed (Venice, California, April 23, 1974). Inside a small garage on Speedway Avenue, I stood
on the rear bumper of a Volkswagen. I lay on my back over the rear section of the car, stretching my arms onto
the roof. Nails were driven through my palms onto the roof of the car. The garage door was opened and the car
was pushed halfway out into the speedway. Screaming for me, the engine was run at full speed for two
minutes. After two minutes the engine was turned off and the car pushed back into the garage. The door was
closed.

Sculpture in Three Parts (Hansen-Fuller Gallery, September 10-21, 1974). I sat on a small metal stool
placed on a sculpture stand directly in front of the gallery entrance, and elevator door. A sign on the stand
read "Sculpture in Three Parts. I will sit on this chair from 10:30 A.M. 9/10/74 until I fall off." About ten
feet away, a camera was constantly attended by changing photographers waiting to take a photograph as I fell.
I sat in the chair for forty-three hours. When I fell, a chalk outline was drawn on the floor around my body. I
wrote "forever" inside the outline. I placed another sign on the stand, which read "I sat on this chair from
10:30 A.M. 9/10/74 until I fell off at 5:25 A.M. 9/12/74." The chair, stand, and outline remained on
exhibit until September 21.

Oh, Dracula (Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, October 7, 1974). I was invited to do a piece
in the foyer of the Utah Museum by the director, E. F. Sanguinetti. The room was filled with Renaissance
*"&
paintings of religious subjects. Using strips of adhesive tape, I made a large chrysalis for my body. I was
mounted on the wall replacing one of the paintings. A lighted candle was placed on the floor beneath my
head, and another at my feet. An engraved plaque, similar to those identifying the paintings, giving my
name, title of the piece, and the date was placed on the wall. I remained in the chrysalis during museum
hours, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. on October 7.

It becomes obvious that labeling Burden as either a "body artist" or a "performance artist" is
to miss the point. It is not his body per se that comprises Burden's piecesbut his mind. The
emphasis is always on those extensions in which he must exist in order to pursue the works he has
set up. His body is merely a tool with which to pry open the lid to the mind.

The presence in Burden's works is sensed but not seen. It is a reality in which few can
participate. He deals with a variety of barriersreal, psychic, or societalthat set up deliberate
stumbling blocks along the path of our knowledge. Even when on occasion it is possible to slip in
through the crack between our reality and his, there is the very real problem of whether we can
handle it when we are there, and if we can satisfactorily fhd our way back again. If one has to ask
"Why bother?' all other questions are moot. The point is that Burden's art allows us to entertain
"What if?" and at the same time shines a light through the night by which we may see, if we should
choose to do so.
*"'

LES LEVINE

Artistic

Audience response to performance artworks is generally more aggressive and active than response
to other visual art forms, such as painting or sculpture. The responses to performance involve
dissatisfaction, anxiety, noncommunication, boredom, and consciousness, to name just a few that are
discussed in this essay by the media artist Les Levine. Referring to his own works, including Space
Walk and Trans-action, Leoine analyzes these responses on an immediate and personal level.

Levine has exhibited his sculptures, video art, environmental art, and what he calls "media art"
widely and has written numerous essays on contemporary art and media.

What the audience expects from the artist is that you be some heroic figure, which they can
look up to. They want you to say, "I'm the greatest fucking artist you have ever seen. I'm the
greatest." But as soon as you've said it, the very instant you say it, they say to you, "Look at that
artist saying such awful, pretentious, ugly things about himself." But they still have to have the
satisfaction of your presenting yourself as a hero.

When you present yourself in such a way that you say, "Here I am trying to sing before you. I
can't sing, but I'm trying to sing. And it's totally obvious that I can't sing," then you're no better
than they are. That's the way they are. They know they can't sing. Here you are doing what they
can do, doing exactly what they do, and you're not being any better than they. You're not allowing
yourself to be any better for them. They're embarrassed that you're not any better than they are.
They're also irritated, you're not any better than they are. They've relegated everything to
professionals. They assume that if you can't sing, you're not supposed to sing. Only doctors are
supposed to know about medicine, only newspapermen know anything about newspapers. The
system knows only about itself. Nobody else knows about it. So a person who's not a singer,
couldn't sing. That's out of the question. They have this sort of middle-class conception about
specialists. And they want the artist to be a specialist. That's what they want from him, that he not
fall down on his job. So when they're embarrassed by his being no better than they are, they don't
just assume that, indeed, maybe he is no better than they are. They won't accept that. They won't
accept the artist saying, "I'm not better than you. I'm just as fucked up as you are."

What they will say is, "He's gone mad." Because being no better than they are is a state of
madness. As far as they can see, being no better than they is totally mad. "He is an absolute
psychological case. That man needs treatment." Because they all need treatment. They need the
treatment, and now you've given them something that is a serious problem. Now you've given
them a model of yourself as themselves. They have some understanding of that model and they
start to see that model. So at that point they just automatically assume that something has gone
wrong, that they are not witnessing what they are supposed to witness. Their mind will not allow
them to authenticate the experience they're having at that time.

It's being dissatisfied with their situation, and the reason they got themselves into that
situation in the first place was being dissatisfied with whatever they were doing before.

So the artist is going to straighten it out for us. The artist will show us how to see. The artist
will see for us. But the artist tells you he can't see any better than you can.

It's the condition of being alive. The relationship between the artist and whomever is more a
universal relationship between everybody and his condition. So the state of dissatisfaction is a
universal state for both the artist and the audience, only it's the artist who's pointing it out.

*"(
The artist in that situation has got to do something absolute. An absolute form in itself. It
can't be questionable. I mean it can be interesting or boring, or randomly exciting, or new or
fresh, or dramatic or undramatic. It can be all of those things, but it's got to be them
spontaneously. It can't be made to be them. It has got to be those things because that's what it is,
that's the nature of it to be that way. Because when you have decided you will absorb the energy
of the audience, and persuade the audience to come toward you in such a way that you absorb
the audience's anxiety and present the audience back with the anxiety, that has to be a totally
genuine thing.

If it's not a totally genuine thing, if you're attempting to conjure it in any way, I don't think it
would work. I think it would be a mess. In that kind of a situation you have got to act as a kind of
open screen or open vessel for their vibrations at that given moment. And that's what you've got
to feed back. It can't be anything you've essentially created.

It's so far-out, the idea that creativity itself is the most negative aspect of art. That's really
beautiful. The artist in creating or attempting to create something totally destroys the creative
process, because the creative process is not to create anything but to allow what is happening to
be absorbed by you in such a way that you can express it and clarify it and make it clear. So that
when you're making it clear, people might say that what you've done is creative.

The only thing that is creative is to allow whatever is happening to be reabsorbed into itself,
which is what the artist does on his highest level. He mirrors it back. Or it is just the making
available of that information, however it manifests itself. That is essentially art. Anything other
than that'is blockage.

I was thinking about how there is a difference between exposing the complete process of how
you do something and all the anxieties that go along with it. There's a very critical point at which
it cannot become an experience that people can deal with because it's just your own personal
sickness or anxiety. People just look at you and say "You have these problems and these problems
need attention." So what I think it has to do with, when it really works, has something to do with
anxieties that are real. The realization that when the audience realizes that you have these
problems that you have to deal withit's that moment when those problems are its problems.
That's what a performance is, rather than becoming separated from each of them. First of all
you've got to relate to other people's anxieties. You've got to be their anxieties. You've got to
become their anxieties in some way, and therefore it can't be the kind of anxiety that merely
comes out of your own ego, which would destroy the structure and would make it meaningless. It
would make people just think, "Well, that's an ego trip." So it's got to be something that is really a
pivotal anxiety of anybody, of any person, not just your own problem.

It has to be an underlying cultural anxiety. And somehow it has also to shed light on that
anxiety. It has to expose that anxiety in such a way that people can see it as an anxiety and not
take it to be part of their equilibrium but see it's not part of their equilibrium, that it's a negative
force that's trying to upset them. Trying to pull the rug out from underneath them.

Besides that, the only thing people have to do is feel it. What generally happens with anxiety
is that you try to anesthetize it so that you don't feel the pain. You know the anxiety is there
because you feel anxiety and you try to get rid of it as quickly as possible, like with American pills,
drugs, and so on. The whole point is to feel anxiety because when you totally feel anxiety and
begin to understand the nature of it, then it doesn't exist, it just fades away.

Actually it's more complicated than that. Because the first thing to do is to feel the anxiety.
Let it all of a sudden out in the open, let it overwhelm you, let it get out of control, let it
annihilate you. Then, second is becoming more aware of that anxiety. Where it arises from. What
is the cause that's producing this effect. What is the whole relationship, other than simple
*")
neurotic self-centeredness. Once you get into the cause and effect and see the whole landscape,
everything changes.

The idea is to center one in one's space. At least demand that amount of reality. That you are
here now. If someone is talking to you in a space or having a conversation with you in a space,
that you should feel the presence of that person and the communication is based on what is
possible to communicate at that moment and not on some secondary notice. I mean if you're in a
place and you make some kind of verbal exchange with a person, even though you've made a
verbal exchange with that person, there's not necessarily any communication. Nothing has been
communicated. Because what you've done really is express the sort of surface-level facade of how
society says you must talk to one another, or how you must get along. If you're in a space or a
room with people and you demand that they absolutely respond to you, that they be themselves
in this situation, and because they are themselves, you automatically would have to be more of
yourself. And so that would be very direct communication. It's very difficult for people. They
don't want to do that or they can't do it.

There's the milk. The container of milk on the table there has to do with the idea that all
ideas in that kind of space are external ideas. What I meant when I said "There's the milk" is that
all things you have in any given situation are external concepts. They're not your concepts. You
don't know how you feel about
them. The world has these things and you're in the world, so you take these things that the
world has at that moment. You go to a supermarket and buy everything that everybody else buys.
Not all the things. But you didn't think about whether that stuff should be in the supermarket in
the first place. That never occurred to you. That's what I mean about your own communication
with yourself. All these things that you think you're thinking, or anybody thinks he's thinking.
They're not thinking. They don't think to eat the
food that they eat. They went into the supermarket, which is a preset kind of situation, and
the supermarket said to them, "You eat the stuff that is here." And they do it. Then they think,
they thought they should do it. But they didn't think they should do it. I think that's an important
point. Because then when they talk to somebody, what they're saying to that person is the same
thing. All the words that are coming out came out of another supermarket. Not a food
supermarket, but another supermarket, a word bank. They deal with it the same way. They think
it's all their own words and all their own way of thinking, but it's not. The very least one should
demand of life is that you're actually saying what you're saying, and you're actually thinking what
you're saying. That's not a very big demand.

Space Walk (1969). Well, the camera is on a dolly, which is a thing that moves around a room
and it holds a camera nice and steady, but it also makes it mobile. So I'm walking around the
room with the camera, with my eye to the camera, looking at everything that is in the room. I go
through the room very slowly, looking at everything. Then I come back around the other side and
go back out again. It takes about a half an hour to do that. What I'm talking about in that
situation is being lost in the space. About being completely lost in the space that I'm in. Just
simply the space that I'm in. The loft I live in. Not any psychological version of space, just that
particular space. Of not understanding what it means to me
that the wall and floor meet at that particular point. And what relationship to my mind or
body has that got? That I could sense that space in any way that I might understand what it means
to me. Or what difference is it to me if I'm standing on the floor, whether the ceiling is up or
down? Does it mean anything at all to me? Is there any way I can sense that way of thinking about
ceiling or floor? There is no way out of being lost.

One of the points that comes up is that the space that is inside is my space and the space that
is outside the space is not my space. So the space that is inside the space is the context for my life.
But it's not a context for my life, because I'm in the space and I don't understand the space and I
don't understand what being in the space has to do with my life. I can understand, for instance,
*#+
that the things that are in the space are things that I brought in, because I liked them or wanted
them or any combination of reasons. But I don't understand why I brought them into the space
that way, and made it that space, and whether this particular space would be ideal for the way I
think or not.

Is there anything about this space that I can really sense? I try to think about the things that
are in the space, that are in everybody else's space. That's a way of thinking about how much it's
not my space, because the things that are in this space are what are in everybody else's space. So
it's everybody else's space. And so everybody else's space is coming into my space. At that point I
get sort of very irate at the idea that everybody else's space is coming into my space, because I
can't understand my space. Because they're making everybody else come into my space. To the
point that I can't see what is in the space that is my space. I continue that way and at a certain
point I start to think about the audience and the way it would see what I'm doing. I've gone
through fifteen minutes of it, right. Fifteen mintues of this kind of movie is not the most exciting
thing you've ever seen. It's a slow-moving camera. It sounds incredibly boring. It's like being lost.
When you're lost, you're just totally bored with the situation and wish it would end. You're
dissatisfied being where you are. Someplace else will give me what I really want.

It is boring if you demand that it be something else. If you demand that it be itself, then it is
not boring. So at that point I start realizing or thinking about the audience's anxiety and trying to
change from my own anxiety. The idea that I'm showing it the same thing again and again. How
it would be upset by seeing the
same thing again and again. Then I get upset with the audience for coming to see something
that it didn't care about, that it didn't want to see in the first place. Coming into my space, when it
would never let me into its space. But it was willing to come into my space and look at what's
happening in my space and be bored with what's happening in my space when it never gave me
an inch for its space.

It goes on in that kind of way, building up to the point that the process of doing it becomes
part of the experience why you continue doing it. It's an idea originally to see if I could sense the
space. But after you're into it fifteen or twenty minutes, that idea is not important anymore. What
is important is that the experience of having gone that far into your own space takes you into
something else. At that point you want to see what you can do with that, or what of that can
become real for you. It's almost to some degree like some kind of self-induced psychodrama,
although psychodrama is too complicated a word for it. It's like you're at a place where you are not
able to sense anything, but you go through the motions of doing what you do, and you don't
sense anything of what you do, and you don't not sense it either. You just do it. But then, you get
into a situation that is a sort of a hypothetical, artificial situation because it is a performance. You
get into that situation and you create an exaggerated sense of feeling in order to see what you can
actually feel. So after a certain amount of time, which is not very long, if you're really doing it
well, you begin to realize that you really can feel things. That it's not an either or neither
situation, that you didn't pass that way or go through that thing without knowing whether or not
you felt it. That time you felt it. If you feel it once, then you want to go on to see what other level
you can get to.

It also has to do with the idea that one is feeling all the time as a natural condition, and what
happens in just living is that one gets anesthetized by the situation or one creates a condition
where one doesn't have to feel, a protective insulation, padding, because if one doesn't feel, it's
just not too horrible. Everything gets padded, like your loft.

I got involved in the idea, too, that I hadn't chosen this space, that this space had chosen me.
That this space had made a decision at some point that I should come into that space. Of course I
realize when you start to think about things that way, people assume you've gone a little crazy. It
tends to be insanity if there's not a full understanding. If your understanding is incomplete or if
*#*
you make one mistake, it's insanity. The actuality is both insane and sane at the same time. Then,
in your case, it's not insanity because it's a performance.

I find that to be the main difficulty with theatre or performance. It's that the structure or very
nature of performances convinces you that somebody is just performing, acting, playing a role,
faking it. When in actuality he should not be performing, but releasing a very immediate mental
state or consciousness, cutting through into his reality. It's the problem of not understanding
what you're doing, in terms of showing people something. It's just making it another trip.

In doing something like the Space Walk piece, there is no way, in my opinion, that it could
work if you were to take the approach that I'm going to sit down and write out what I think
should be said as a script about this. The language has to come out of some artificially induced
thing. From its own initial artificial state at some point it becomes real, and for that moment it is
reality for you, and because it is a reality, you can feel it as a reality for others.

I was interested in the idea, too, of the difference between being in something and looking at
it: like the difference between being in a movie in the space where the movie is being made and
sitting in the audience watching the movie. If you're in the audience watching the movie, you're
seeing a picture and your experience is related to that two-dimensionality, of whether you think
it's an interesting or boring picture, or whatever kind of picture it is. But it's just a picture.
Whereas if you're in the actual movie, making the movie, in the middle of it, you never see it as a
picture. You see it as a sort of environmental space that you're in. Or you don't even read it as a
space, it's just an activity that you're involved in. Whereas if you're sitting, you're not involved in
an activity. You're just watching a movie. So the level of interest is considerably different.

I also did this piece for Vancouver called Trans-action (1974). It's spelled like transaction, but
it's hyphenated, so it's Trans-action. What has happened is that mailers have been sent out to
people in the Vancouver area asking them to buy a product, any kind of product, for which they
didn't pay any more than a dollar. And with it they were sent a "fact sheet" of about fifteen
questions, which they're supposed to fill in. Some of the questions are really simple, like, "Where
did you buy the product? Why did you choose that place? Why did you choose the product?' But
some of them are evaluation questions, what you thought of the actual transaction, and others are
to remember the exact words the salesperson said to you when you purchased the object. So what
will happen is all these "fact sheets" will come into the museum with the objects that have been
purchased. And that will be the art. Everybody will think that's why I call it Trans-action. Everybody
will think that the art is what is now brought in: the packages of toothpaste or whatever those
people buy. But the art is in having those people do that. I mean that action. All those people
going to those stores and filling out these things, that's the art. That's the action involved.

I had the idea that the whole society was going toward a postconscious state, completely
postconscious state. As if no decisions anybody could ever make anymore would really be
decisions, that the ultimate high level would be that you have no consciousness at all. You have no
sense of consciousness. You are not able to perceive the idea of consciousness. One of the ways I
thought one could express that would be doing things that you could react to only viscerally, that
you don't react intellectually or any other way; if you try to structure them intellectually, they're
mindless or they appear to be mindless. But they're not mindless, they're just not conscious.
They're not involved in the concept of consciousness. I can tell you about one of the things I
thought one could do. One of them was to take a sheet of paper and put it on the floor, then to
put a record on your phonograph and play the record, and stand on the sheet of paper, with
some kind of any color on your feet, and without ever looking at the paper dance randomly to
the record,
trying to sing with the record at the same time. Then when the whole thing is over, when the
record's over, which is two minutes, or whatever they are, what has happened on the sheet of
paper is the work of art, along with the recording of your voice trying to sing with that record. It
*#"
would be all this random dancing on a sheet of paper, without looking or thinking. The reason I
pick feet is your feet are the least articulate. It's very hard to use your feet as tools, whereas you
can use your hands as tools. You can draw things or shape things with your hands. It's very hard to
shape anything with your feet. They may be tools, but you haven't been accustomed to articulate
them as tools. So that would be something that
would be totally without consciousness at all. Because there would be no way you could
consciously make it work. Everybody would think that it is completely illogical, but it would work,
and the reason it would work and it would probably work very well would be that doing it would
have some exact phenomenal relationship to how you express yourself. You wouldn't be able to
define what that relationship is, but it would be there anyway. It would be something that could
not be intellectualized too easily. Nevertheless, it would be there, because your body has that
sense, in the absence of your mind. Your body is used to navigating your body through space.
Your mind is used to making your body do what your body wants to do or your mind wants your
body to do, or whatever. But you could make your body work in the absence of your mind. You
could make your body do what it's viscerally equipped to do, because it has muscles and nerves
and what have you. It probably could produce something that would be just as strong as what
your brain could produce, but your brain would take it from a presup posed, logical intellectual
position, and your body would take it from a phenomenal, completely unconscious position. But
what I'm saying is that I don't think it would matter. It would work anyway.

There're all these guys out on the West Coast who really interest me. They're doing things I
think are very postconscious. They just take roles. Maybe that's not the way to express it. They
take on a character. Let's say your name is John Doe. You decide that tomorrow, for argument's
sake, you want to be Pancho Gonzales, the tennis player. From that moment on you will not
respond to people if they don't call you Pancho. If they call you John, you disregard them. You
don't hear what they say. If they call you Pancho, then you speak to them. And you always dress in
tennis clothes, as if you're always ready to go on the court. People know that you're Pancho and
they know they have to talk to you about tennis because that's your thing. You're a tennis player
and you like to talk about tennis. So there are all these guys on the West Coast who are involved
in that. Their whole art is just involved in what I assume to be some nonintellectual,
postconscious role-playing, where the only level of the art is becoming somebody. That's the art.
Maybe I'm getting it wrong because I haven't seen it very closely. So I may not be getting a very
accurate view of it. But I find it interesting that people would do that.

I love those guys. I was in L.A. with a bunch of them. We were in this apartment getting
stoned, and this guy who we were hanging out with gets up and says he's going to the bathroom.
He disappears for two hours and when he comes back, someone asks him where he's been, and
he says, "I went to the bathroom." Questioned further about how it was, it turned out that going
to the bathroom meant going across town and visiting a woman friend. It totally blew my mind.
The idea being the changing of the name of an activity to something else. Right! I'm going to
pour some tea and then you chop down a tree. That's really interesting. It's like remaking
language. Or trying not to realize that language exists in the form that it exists, which is really
nice.

One of the things I thought about this kind of postconsciousnesthe first thought I had was
knitting. That an artist should give up making art and just start knitting. Get a set of needles and
a ball of yarn and just start knitting, and knit every day. Of course, when you tell anybody that
idea, he thinks it's utterly ridiculous. But to me it's not that far from practice. In a certain kind of
way it is not that far from the idea of just centering on one simple thing, that has no mind levels
attached to it, that doesn't go anywhere and can't go anywhere because there's no place for it to
go. Just keep doing the same thing all the time. It's a way of staying out of the space of your mind
and not going anyplace, because normally when you go out of the space of your mind, you go
somewhere else. You look at a movie or you do something else. But knitting, at least the way I
thought about it, won't allow you to get into the space of your mind.
*##

It's a non-karma-producing activity. A nonactivity. It's a little too complicated to be able to do
it without thinking a little about it. At the same time it doesn't absorb your thoughts enough to
get totally into it. It just prevents you from having thoughts. So I did it one night. Knitting. It felt
terrific. Getting out of your rotten mind.

I thought it was really nice. I enjoyed it, doing it. I enjoyed doing nothing except just saying
the same thing: needle in, wool over, drop back. Just constantly repeating the same kind of thing.
Except there were a couple of people there. They got totally freaked out by it. They got the
feeling, I'm not sure what feeling they got because they didn't tell me, but I read the feeling to be
distress of some sort. They were very distressed by it. Very distressed that somebody was doing
thisknitting. Sitting there knitting.

It's very painful when you first stop the mind because the mind is what fills the space.

I felt very strange about why they were so distressed. They couldn't relate to it at all. They
couldn't even get into it on the giggle level, obviously it has some of that aspect to it.

Who were they? One was Frank Lilly, and the other was Franoise something or other. She's
some French stage director or something. She was a little more interested in it. She wasn't as
distressed by it. She was slightly fascinated. She was sort of wondering, was there something of
value in it. She hadn't made up her mind. I sensed that, even though she didn't say anything. But
Frank was quite clear about it. It was distressing him. Why do you think that is? Why do you think
he would be distressed by it?

It has to do with surrender, surrendering to the situation of just being where you are now.
Quieting the mind. You're just watching yourself in space, rather than filling it up heavily with
your mind. If you're unaware of it or unaware of what is happening, the loss of ego, which is what
it's about, then you find yourself in a very unpleasant situation. The ego becomes threatened. You
are taking away the illusions about how it fills space. And when the ego feels threatened, it can be
very nasty. I didn't see how it could threaten anybody's ego, though.

There you are in a situation where four people have gotten together and they're really not
very close friends. They don't see each other all the time and are not used to occupying the same
space together.
People have this identity or personality, which is their illusion of who they are, particularly in
an alien situation, about how they should act. You are saying, "I am Les Levine." He is saying, "I
am Frank Lilly." You each have a special identity in the world, which you occupy physically with
your body and your mind and all the things you have done and are doing. That's the way you
relate to the space and the people around you. You create your own space. You made your loft,
not me. You are Les, and you and Frank
are having a social exchange. Then when you take away the ground you both have in
common, it can be very frightening. It's as if you're naked and alone in space, with no help and
no supports. Knitting, as a device, can do this. It can take away your identity. The way Frank Lilly
relates to Les Levine, the way they communicate. It can act like pulling the rug out from
underneath you.

Except, it's very relaxing too.

It's not so relaxing. The result may be relaxing. It's like meditation. It can be very painful,
because you're dealing with the mind. An example is sitting for an all-day meditation, twelve
hours, just sitting watching yourself breathe, and watching all the thoughts as they arise in your
head and letting those thoughts fall away as they arise. It can be totally horrible.

*#$
But I don't mean relaxing in the sense that you're going to sleep. It doesn't necessarily feel
good. That's actually the secret. When it feels lousy, you might actually be making some progress.
Getting down to dealing with the space you're occupying.

But don't you feel, given the way our lives are, that it's great to stop and go through some of
what is happening in your life. So what if it's painful. Cutting through the speed. Stopping
everything. Meditation is very difficult. To knit, just to sit there and watch the process without
your mind rushing in and filling your space with a thousand thoughts, is as difficult as thinking
about Japan and actually going there. When you think about Japan, you're there instantly, in
whatever fantasy you have about it, but to get your body there, to get Les Levine there, is a whole
other trip.

Sure, except there's no way of not being lost. Probably there's no way of not being lost, but I
think understanding that you are lost, and that we're all lost in space, is probably worthwhile.
Absolutely, that's the point.

And then people say, about anything you do, that it's pointless to do, and they don't do
anything. That's not very interesting. I don't really know either if being lost is such a bad thing.

That's the point.

I mean it's probably a good thing. Because somehow the only reason you ever want to do
anything, really, that is exciting or interesting to you is to find out why you're doing it. And if you
knew why you were doing it, you wouldn't do it.

You come up with the realization that the condition of being lost is the beginning condition,
is the only condition that exists, and the realization of which is the goal to be achieved totally. To
think at any point that you are not lost is just fooling yourself.
*#%

ROB LA FRENAIS

An Interview with Laurie Anderson*

As the art form most characteristic of the 1970s, the shifts and developments in performance are
more readily identified when viewed with the work of artists whose period of research and discovery
spans those years. Since her first performance in 1972, Laurie Anderson has brought performance out
of museums and galleries to radio and clubs, out of the art world and, as she would say, into the
culture. Her performances of United States Part II and her records are, in many ways, responsible
for bringing performance to a wider audience here and abroad.

In the following interview she discusses, among other things, her use of technology, her theory of
"live art," and the lack of a clear definition for performance, which she finds advantageous. Citing
the diverse work of Vito Acconci, Glenn Branca, William Burroughs, and Marina Abramovi/Ulay,
Anderson notes that "the wonderful thing about performance art is it's just completely ill-defined.
it crosses over lines, and that's really what makes it live. It's constantly changing the rules."

Rob La Frenais is the editor of Performance Magazine. The interview was conducted on
October 1981 at Riverside Studios, London.

ROB LA FRENAIS: What other artists do you identify with? Working artists, living working
artists?

LAURIE ANDERSON: In terms of technique, not many. But in terms of intent, probably
people like Vito Acconci. In terms of politics, William Burroughs is one of my heroes and also
in terms of style, his absolute precision he's just not sloppy and I love that. I mean it's the kind
of time I like to use, too. I try to compress my work.

RL: So you've never gone in for endurance work?

LA: It seems too puritanical to me "I'm gonna do this because it's really hard and it refers to
working" it doesn't even refer to working, it is working, there's no metaphor in it at all. You
know Chris Burden's aesthetic: I'm not going to talk about pain, I'm going to be in pain. I think
it's interesting to get rid of the metaphor, but I don't choose to work that way myself.

RL: What of your contemporaries?

LA: In terms of music, my favorite music right now is Glenn Branca's. He's a guitarist. That's
funny because I really think that guitars are usually sort of irritating, you know, this twangy rock-
'n'-roll macho, and lyrics you can't hear, and all that. Glenn Branca's a guitarist who does a lot of
real strange rock-'n'-roll stuff which I really like. He uses the guitar so well. His Symphony no. 1
was performed this summer in New York with fifteen people. Crazy very, very precise music, the
loudest thing you ever heard incredibly powerful. In terms of European performance artists,
Marina Abramovi/Ulay. They're real clear. And of course the wonderful thing about
performance art is it's just completely ill-defined. It's really kind of excitingall this totally
different work and it's called "performance art," because no one can figure out what to call it.

RL: We have that problem

LA: I don't think it's a problem really

RL: I think "live art" is an easier expression.

*#&
LA: Yeah, that's nice and of course then it becomes shady in a lots of ways, and it crosses over
lines, and that's really what makes it live. It's constantly changing the rules.

RL: I'm going to change tack now. Why is it that you and other American artists can pursue
such close love/hate relationships with your country and patriotism? If such obsessions were
followed here, it would be a bit like playing with fascism.

LA: In what way would it be like playing with fascism for you?

RL: Well, if a performance artist started going on about England and our culture like that-in
fact that's happened to Gilbert and George, they are about the only ones I know that have done
anything of this sort. It seems to me that both yourself and other artists can talk about flags and
America and all this you can play with these ideas, you may not believe in it, that you can play
such a close game with them without anyone being offended.

LA: Oh, people are offended. First of all, my ideas on politics, to compress them for a second,
is the most important thing to me is not to be didactic: (a) I am not running for political office,
(b) I don't have the answers even if I were going to run for political office, and (c) as an artist, I
consider my job a descriptive one, not prescriptive, you know. I don't have any answers for
anybody. Art as propaganda is dangerous, and the best example I know of this is let's say you
hear a song. It's an incredibly beautiful song and
you just immediately love it, but you can't understand the words; the lyrics are buried. You
listen to this song fifty times, and finally you understand the lyrics, and they're awful they're
stupid. But it's too late, the song is inside you, there's nothing you can do. This is to me the
principal difference between ideas and art. Art enters you first of all sensually, through your ears
and eyes, and and it's tricky it becomes a kind of propaganda if you push it inside someone
before they have a chance to say, "No, that's not a good idea! That's a stupid idea. Politically I'm
against it." So the situation I'm interested in creating is, yes, a sensual one, but one that's airy
enough so that people can say, "Well, I'll think about that but I don't have to think about it right
now. I'll think about it later, maybe totally disagree with it later. But now, I'll just sit back and
watch." I'm not up on a soapbox you know. Well I am talking about the soapbox. I think that art is
a very inefficient carrier of political ideas. And anyway, if given a choice between somethin?, I
thought was politically, let's say, "correct," and something that was very beautiful and strange, I
would choose the second. The, last time I tried to work directly in politics was in '72. I was a
marshal at a Playboy demonstration at a Playboy Club in New York. We were all marching up and
down in front of the club and video was there, all the TV people. And someone who worked at
the club came to work and she was saying, "Oh, all these people, whart are they doing here?' And
she asked me, because I was in charge of the communications aspect of this thing, she said, ''How
come you're all here? And I said, "Well, we're protesting the fact that women are treated in a
certain way and she said, "Look, I make 800 dollars a week at this job, I have three kids, I have
no husband, this is the best job I've ever had. If you want to talk about women not making money,
why don't you go down to the garment district where women make 75 cents an hour? Why don't
you demonstrate down there? And I said, "Well Good idea!" The thing is the TV crews don't
want to go down to the garment district because their steady cam bumps along the cobblestones
and it's too dark, and the women just don't want to go down there because they figure we want
news, we want to show our position in the spotlight. This was the last demonstration I was involved
in because it was palpably about a certain kind of PR stunt that didn't work. It was ineffectual
politically. Stupid. It was coopted by the news stations to say, "Here are the girls at the Playboy
Club this is a swell novelty story."

RL: In that aspect would you say that you are still moving in certain directions in a more
indirect way?

*#'
LA: There's no way that I can edit out my political ideas from my work. And I don't want to.
They're implicit anytime you make anything. My idea with making things like records satisfied me
because as a performance artist I produce no real physical objects. And a record it's skinny, it's
small, and it's cheap, and it's exactly the piece and everybody gets exactly the same thing, and its
affordable and I like that. And I like the idea, also, of using a system like a large record company
to do it. I thought for.many months before I signed up that other artists are just going to goOh
God, what a sell-out. You know I talked to a lot of my friends about their positions on that and
then decided ultimately to do it and uh I think that I'm glad that I did.

RL: You've yet to find out.

LA: I have yet to find out.

RL: I want to ask you some more personal questions. What's your own personal mode of
transport? Do you drive a car?

LA: No. I take the train subway. I like New York because it's crowded. And you get shoved in
with everybody everybody's on the train. You know. And it's not like L.A. where you're just
absolutely isolated from other people. Which is one of the reasons that crime is very different in
L.A. Crime there is crazy crime, you go to the desert and cut off someone's fingers and eat them.
Crimes of loneliness really. Cabin fever crimes.

RL: Sorry, what?

LA: Cabin fever. You're in your cabin. C-A-B-I-N. You're sitting there, you know, for thirty
years there are these long winters, and you're sitting across from your relatives and pretty soon,
you pick up the kitchen knife and you lop one of their heads off. Out of loneliness.

RL: That's a statistic, isn't it, in snowy places like Canada?

LA: Yes it is. That's what you do. And in New York it's much more a practical thing: I need
money, I'll go and stick someone up and get the money. It's nothing personal, you know, "Excuse
me, sorry but I have to take your money"

RL: So this affects the way you consider the thing about transport. Transport and crime,
interesting connection.

LA: Well, they're very connected in New York at the moment, well, because of the
underground situationyou go underground, you're literally beyond the pale in terms of rules.

RL: When I was in New York, I found it a bit of a joke, really. I went on, and there were these
guys edging up towards me, and we said something in very loud English accents, "I say, do you
think they're muggers?," and they ran out of, they ran away.

LA: Well, that's perfect. You have immediate street savvy, and that's exactly how to exist there.
You did exactly the right thing. Burroughs has written some wonderful things about the subway.
His book Blade Runner. The book is set in the future, as all the books are. Medical care would be
too expensive for anyone to obtain. And if you're a doctor and you're caught with surgical
instruments, you're immediately arrested. So all the operations are performed underground in
the New York subway system, in rooms off the tracks. And the kids are runners, black kids in
tennis shoes, real fast tennis shoesthey're the blade runners, the ones that deliver the surgical
instruments. The brilliant thing about Burroughs is that he concentrates on one aspectone of
his main themes is medicineand really looks on it. What happens when you get sick. You can
look at the whole culture that way.
*#(

RL: Another question. Do you have a dog?

LA: No. Never had a dog. Uh

RL: Cat?

LA: No animals, no because they leave tracks on my machines! (Laughter.)

RL: Right. Why dogs? [in her performances]

LA: Dogs, I guess because there's something really very nice about a voice that isn't
articulating into words. I wrote a song called "If You Can't Talk About It, Point to It," which was
actually for a sculptor friend of mine who doesn't talk much.

RL: What's your attitude to immortality. Would you choose, for example, to be cryogenically
preserved?

LA: I know this isn't answering your question, but actually I do like to take a lot of trips to
other kinds of places. I go somewhere with no money and no plans, just to see what's going on.
The first trip I did like that was to the North Pole.

RL: Ah, yes, you hitchhiked to the North Pole?

LA: And then to places like Kentucky, very low-tech places.

RL: What happened when you hitchhiked to the North Pole?

LA: I got there actually by bush planes. I started at Houston Street in New York, started
hitchhiking up there, and then in Canada I was getting rides with people who were either draft
resisters and could never go back to the United States or people who'd been to Vietnam and had
gone crazy there, and all they wanted to do was fly little planes around. So, I was just sitting there
in the passenger seat and we'd make these crazy dips and dives all over the place. "Watch this!
Neeeoooww!," you know, real suicide-type flight pattern. It was a wonderful trip because it was
about being utterly alone, and in a strange place.

RL: What do you consider the principal limitations to any ambitions you might have?

LA: Not being able to wake up in the morning and spend just a couple of hours staring out
the window. Unless I can do that I feel totally automatic. So, this couple of hours is crucial, and
then the rest of the day I'm my own slave, getting things physically done.

RL: You quote, in your show, someone saying, "Are you talking to me or are you just
practicing for one of those performances of yours?" Do you consciously allow your work to
infiltrate your life and vice versa in that way?

LA: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because I don't divide my work and my lifeit's not a question of
infiltration: that's all I do. That may sound pretty dull but it's really the way I have the most fun.

RL: How do you feel when someone says that sort of thing to you? Does it make you think,
well, what am I?

LA: Yeah, of course. Sure it does. And it's an odd situation to be working in this way. Because,
basically I see nobody, or a couple of friends. I'm a recluse, and then I go into a room where
*#)
there are lots of people and do these performances. I do ride the train and go places and meet
people that I wouldn't have the chance to meet downtown in the art world. It's like a dormitory
there, it really is. All you see are other artists. But I need that kind of contact, seeing what other
people are up to. It's the reason I choose to live in a dump like New York. (Laughter.)

RL: Don't you think that technology has overreached its own ability to radically change the
world, that it can only really work for a privileged few?

LA: Hmm. Depends on who you consider the privileged few. The main question, of course, is
what is this new technical innovation, how is it going to improve lives? You have to consider whose
life, and who's paying for that life to get improved. Those are the first questions you have to ask.
Basically, it's going to do something for someone. Now, in terms of technology affecting people's
lives on a daily basis, this is what my work is really centered on. How does a person really cope
with being in an electronic world? You
turn on a TV and it doesn't work, and unless you're a technician or an engineer, you probably
can't fix it. You're living in a world that's extremely alienating. After this so-called Armageddon if
you try to reconstruct even just the electrical situation in your house-forget about anything else
forget about the TV that's sitting there, or was sitting there. What could you do? As for the
privileged few, there's a phone sitting in everybody's house. I mean everybody's house. And so my
work is about what happens when you pick up the phone and try to get through. The last phone
call I got in New York was very frightening. It was a tape. Phone rang, it was a tape.

RL: What? That's amazing.

LA: And I don't have an answering machine.

RL: Do you regard this as an advanced response to the technology, or a Luddite response?

LA: Yeah. It's a Luddite response. It's just uh I don't want to use that system, and I know it's
inefficient not to use it, but I think that I'd rather not give the information or get it than talk to a
machine. It doesn't mean that I don't like machines, I love machines. But I want to learn how to
use them well.

RL: How far do you think you can go before it seems, then, that the actual hardware is taking
over your work? Do you take it to the limit?

LA: Oh, I don't know. I try not to dream of equipment that I don't have. When I started using
electronics, I used only what I could afford: things like sixty-nine-cent speakers. I live on the
electronic junk street in New York, Canal Street, where things like that are easy to get. I try to use
only what I have. You can run into trouble otherwise. The best example of this is students in an
art school. Say they're painters and they want to make video tapes, but they don't have any
equipment, it's too expensive. So they have to get a deck somehow and then quickly make the
tape, maybe without understanding the medium. It's as if a painter wanted to make a painting.
He'd have to think about the painting for months and then, one day, go out and rent a brush and
make the painting really fast. And then return the brush the next day to the rental place clean.
Obviously, it's hard to make a painting this way. You have to work with the material for a while to
find out about it. Any sculptor knows that. You know, when I think I'm finished as an artist, and
that I'll never have another idea, it's totally depressing, and the first thing I do is just try to
unclench a little bit from that attitude. And second, to just play with whatever tools I have.
Because tools will teach you things. I want to control the technology I use. And not to just set
them on automatic then it's just some kind of show you've designed and you're the technician.
If I'm on tour and a machine breaks down, I have to know something about that machine so that
I can fix it.

*$+
RL: And you do?

LA: Well, I don't know all the circuitry, but I can do first aid.

RL: What are your views on space travel? Tom Klinkowstein [the telex artist] is so obsessed
with it that he's booked space on the space shuttle to send up a small transmitter.

LA: Someone in Zurich gave me a beautiful picture of the first woman cosmonaut. Actually I
don't know too much about her. I know she went up, I'm not sure whether she came bgck. But
she did go up, as I believe several women in the U.S.S.R. have. And I think in the United States
they're considering sending women.

RL: What, to see what happens

LA: Breeders, you know, just people who are going to colonize, become colonists.

RL: Biological experiments up there?

LA: I don't know. Of course, it doesn't fit into the thrust idea of outer space to have women
go, so, you know, as a metaphor it's purely male. In Europe there's a sense of masculinity and
femininity that just does not exist in the United States. One of the things I've noticed about
coming to Europe is I always go into a shop and I buy one thing, like a dress, a skirt, or some
piece of jewelry. And I go home to New York and I look at this dress and I think, where am I ever
going to wear this thing? In Germany I'm some sort of freak because they figure a woman can't do
technological things. Then something breaks, and I know how to fix it, and they go, "Oh, OK. Fix
it."

RL: You dedicated your work to Nikola Tesla, and the Tesla Institute in Yugoslavia phoned
you up and asked you to go and talk to them. Have you been?

LA: Yes, they asked me to come because I dedicated a few things to Tesla. I met the
Yugoslavian delegation and I felt it was like some kind of setup, because it was. I walked into this
place on the ninth floor, I was a bit afraid, and there were lots of junkies lying around on each
floor, and Mexican families, lots of kids crying and running around. And I came into this place
and it was just lit with three blinking fluorescent lights, and I could hardly see, and there was a
vast plate of potato chips on the table, and I had a kind of meeting with these three guys who all
kept basically just being very very flirtatious, and it ended with that. I never understood that
evening. So I never went to Yugoslavia.

RL: How funny!

LA: Yeah, it was very strange.

RL: Yet you'd had this phone call from Yugoslavia and it had ended up with that.

LA: Yeah, and then they showed me some movies that were half sort of blue movies and half
movies about Tesla. It's one of the many dead ends.

RL: It sounds silly, but what do you think of the Soviet Union?

LA: Well, you know the cold war's on again and the U.S.-U.S.S.R. boogie-boogie men are
back. As an American, I'm poorly informed about the U.S.S.R. because we get very tilted ideas of
what's going on in our press. One of the reasons I'm happy to leave the United States, in a lot of
ways, is that I can get different kinds of information. It's very difficult to get information
*$*
anywhere, even in Europe it's really quite hard. A lot of my friends have gone to China and have
come back with just some very crazy kinds of stories. They met people who asked questions like
"Do you really have robots in the United States?' And the artists said, "Sure we do." They wanted
to throw them off the track, so they told them, "Yes, everyone has lots of robots." And they asked,
"Do many of you live on the moon as well?' And the artists said, "Yes, a lot of our friends live on
the moon, and we travel around all the time in outer space." And the Chinese said, "Really?"

RL: I was talking to an American recently, and I also read this, that postwar U.S. avant-garde
art was deliberately exported by the CIA to counteract European social realism in the fifties. Have
you heard that one?

LA: No, but I think in a lot of ways it's one of our national pastimes to think about what the
CIA might be doing and giving a lot of credit to the CIA that they shouldn't have. I think one of
the things which happened in the postwar United States is that suddenly Americans had a sense
of themselves that was quite different, and they felt more powerful, unlike at the present
moment, and more hopeful, and new, and that they could make their own art, and they felt they
didn't have anything to do with what happened in Paris and they could say, "I'm gonna make a
giant blue painting. That's it. Or I'm gonna take my brush and go flang flang flang." And then,
after that, the intellectuals came along, people like Barnett Newman, and, by the way, this is my
half-baked theory about performance art and live artmy theory is that it began with this kind of
heroic, gestural, physical situation, artists who said, "I paint because I like paint. That's why I
paint." Then you get guys like Barnett Newman, who was very smart. And he's a person who's
sitting in the same bar talking to the people who write about art. And he's been painting a blue
painting, and he's talking about the meaning of this blue paint. An extremely articulate guy who is
capable
of saying things like "Aesthetics is to me what ornithology is to birds." Now, in fact, he didn't
really believe that, because much of his work was about talking about the edge, the field, and the
tension, and this and that. Much of his art is about the language that surrounds it. He's standing
by his blue painting, looking at it, and talking about it. And that's, I believe, the generation ahead
of what's called live art, which is people really standing next to blue in real time, saying, "Blue
is They come out of a tradition which has been very talky. The theory has bound itself into the
work so tightly that it in fact generates another form. That's my own half-baked theory.

RL: A couple of explanations now. What is the "hand that takes? [from "O Superman"]

LA: It's one of the gestural signals. In the first section, the transportation section, all the
movements, images, and sounds are stereo, panning left to right. A kind of windshield wiper that
does this (arclike movement) constantly. And each section has a direction and a hand signal that
signifies the structure of the work. And also a diagram for the whole piece. It's a kind of long,
slow, Ping-Pong game. In the second section, the political section, the axis switches to a vertical
one. Everything drops. Sounds and images rise and fall. The gesture is one of power (Flexes arm.)
and judgment (Arm drops.). The third section is the money section. The physical arm gesture for
money is this (grabbing movement) and the sound image axis shifts to a kind of suction, it's like
being on a fast road.

RL: Do you think that the human being is going to evolve very fast?

LA: Let's just take women, for example. Look at what women tried to do in the late sixties and
seventies, the seventies particularly, and the backsliding that's happened since then. You can't
legislate relationships. They're too deeply ingrained. Too deep in women, too deep in men.
Maybe in a thousand years, but not in twenty, things could be different.

RL: I get the feeling from U.S. artists working in communications that, sooner or later,
everyone is going to have access to communications, and things are then going to be OK.
*$"

LA: I'm not so thrilled by getting linked up to everybody, getting a direct in to their brains. I
like the mystery of not being able to do that.

RL: We're just getting CB here, they're legalizing it, and my immediate feeling is "I don't want
to talk to that person in the car in front of me."

LA: Exactly.

RL: They're making such a big fuss about it, but I just don't believe the British could be so
pally with each other.

LA: The most important thing is that people learn to talk to each other. Electronics is only a
mediator. Its effectiveness depends on how well it's used. I like electronics because it's fast, like
the brainits circuitry.

RL: Finally, why is there such a great U.S. appetite for UFO contactee experience and the
like?

LA: We just hope someone comes down and talks to us, you know. We just like to talk.

*Excerpts were edited for publication here by Laurie Anderson and Robert Nickas in New
York, December 1981.
*$#

DAVID SHAPIRO

Notes on Einstein on the Beach

In the following essay David Shapiro describes the Robert Wilson-Philip Glass collaboration,
Einstein on the Beach, as "a theatre that tends toward pure plot Opera as Joseph Cornell box
opera... as flat and usable as a map" And he adds, "Here all is spectacle but not mere
spectacle." In these notes, populated by Alfred Jarry, Jasper Johns, Paul Czanne, and others, the
author investigates the performance through its structure, its architecture, and its time. He finds in
Wilson "the necessary shamanism required to heal us," and in Einstein on the Beach the highest
and lowest and furthest and nearest reaches of the human spirit."

David Shapiro is the author of many volumes of poetry and art and literary criticism, including
January, Poems from Deal, The Page-Turner, Jim Dine, John Ashbery, and Lateness. He is
also a translator, an editor, a teacher, and a violinist and has given numerous performances as a
poet during the last twenty years.

To Christophe de Menil

I

Nothing is more attractive to a poet than the wordless theatre. It is an ideal that has lured
Paul Valry to the dance and to a mental theatre, as in his dialogues, plays, and Monsieur Teste.
One might think of Robert Wilson's best work as having quixotic scale, in which as a designer of
seemingly theatrical mental interiors he searches for an absurd amount of truth in funnily
disproportionate items: a bed floating away for a half hour to refreshingly simple music by Philip
Glass. His repetitions remind us that as William James said there is no repetition: only
persistence. His plays, along with those of the improvisational pieces of Kenneth Koch (The Gold
Standard), Gertrude Stein, and John Ashberry, are the few one could place next to the classic
poetry of our period. His coups de thtre are even conventionally thrilling. He has devised a
tableau vivant to become a minute particular, then a grand particular. It is and promotes such
thinking and listening. For once, as Martin Heidegger remarked abut the sentence, "Language
speaks in the poem," we are taken nowhere but find ourselves where we are already. It is sufficient
theatre and finds its exuberant collaborators in the wise passivity of its audience.
II

I. Opera as Joseph Cornell box, containing, as the critic and painter Fairfield Porter said it
did, the highest and lowest and furthest and nearest reaches of the human spirit.

2. In Roman Jakobson's sense, the opera is dominated by the metonymic senseaIl is
contiguity, surround. Yet the train, the bed, the field are also metaphorical, that other pole on
the axis of the "poetic."

3. Certainly, this is an uncertain mystery play without dominant "referentiality."

4. Aristotle deposes spectacle, an element of drama beneath plot and diction. Here all is
spectacle. Diction degree zero. Plot degree infinity.

5. Theatre of indifferentism. An opera as disinterested as an analyst. Opera as round. Opera
electrified, even when we're not. Terrible to think that all phonemes might be saying "does eat
*$$
oats."

6. In Europe it was known as the circus, and behind it of course, is the tradition of the
carnival, Alfred Jarry, farce, Grand Guignol, Antonin Artaud, Stein's neglected plays. And so this
is peculiarly a synthetic accomplishment, an achievement that assimilates almost all elements of
surrealism, the new realism, and so forth. Its parodies, paradoxically, are not humiliations but
restorations.

7. On stage nothing is colloquial or purely demotic. Context makes the merest movement
here dance within the quotation marks of the stage.

8. The patriarchal judge says, "Paris has a background of history. ... These men prefer the
darkness." Nothing is as sad as this dictionary of clichs, which is indeed distinct from a clich,
"Her kisses can melt the gold in a man's teeth." An encyclopedia of sottises, bses, l'absurde.
Suddenly interrupted by the stuttering, still, sad voice of the child in aphasia: "Would I? Would I?"

9. The play appeals through a seemingly healthy regressus ad parnassum in matters sexual.
Eros here is a veil interposed between a inner and outer chaos. The mind is skeptical of the
conversion this opera may afford.

10. Every entrance is a relief. The diagonals in the play, threads and triangles, are part of the
geometric zeal of the central topos, if there is one, the drastic diagonals of a split in the culture, a
split between culture and nature.

11. Symmetry reigns here and it is impossible not to be suspicious sometimes of the music
that seems to come as much out of the totalitarianisms of rock as out of Indian persistences. The
question is often, How may coups de thtre make a theatre?

12. Here the phonological component abides. The perky little colloquial movements are also
like the vowels that dominate in the solfge cadenzas of bliss. Not the importance of being
earnest, but the importance of "of," the importance of being, the unimportance of import.

13. The opera has what one might call Quixotic Scale. It is the scale of a Desire equivalent to
some Hegelian Emptiness. As American as Einstein and New Jersey, this meditative theatre, filled
with lamentoso interpolations by a darker saxophone as radio schedules are recited sadly.

14. Is this our artistic-scientific Stonehenge, longed for by the Structuralists? Certainly this is a
very effective piece of myth. The split imagery (trial scene divides, binary oppositions of partners
during Knee Joints, and so forth) could be effectively traced as in Claude Lvi-Strauss's
monograph to a repressive masked society attempting to heal itself. But is this a successful
meditation between nature and culture? Meditation through amplification?

15. The phonemes here are in context as complete texts of the incomplete. Never have so few
numerals been repeated by so many The music seems unaccountably full. Possibly because it is
setting the canonically empty" elements of the phonological.

16. Luckily the opera is not one of suspense. Wilson has selected well the static myth of
Einstein, who suffers as fixedly as operatic Oedipus. One thinks of Einstein's "God does not play
dice." He said this to the quantum mechanicians, who resemble a Jocasta in their aleatory zeal
The opera's intuitive and random elements play over a very fixed solemn structure. As the
catalogue says, structure is the subject. Melancholy festival of late science, late art, late criticism.
No turmoil, the antinomian heresy writ large.

*$%
17. Two judges, an old black man and a child. That is, we are being judged by the child and
by what we have rejected. What might Jean Piaget say about an opera in which the formal
intelligence is arraigned by the earlier stage? Language as disturbance. Wilson, like Jakobson, has
had a career of involvement in problems of aphasia. He has built opera and other works
paradoxically around this locus classicus of physiological deconstruction of language.

18. We are reminded by constant iterations that we "have been avoiding the beach." Nature,
chaos. The Hopi, like Wilson, have no simple word for wave. Repetition of numerals functions
here as a hysterical Jasper Johns, a reminder too of the de Saussurean arbitrariness of meaning.
Meaning as position and difference. Each note seems to say So what. Opera in a slow retreat from
Logos? No, logotherapy in opera with presentational, not representational, dominant.

19. Wilson converts the opera into something as flat and usable as a map. Here opera draws
attention to itself as a selfregulating whole, not by the usual thickening of language but by the
deliquescence of so many seemingly central resources. While there is a little bit of the merely
magical to Wilson, there is much of the necessary shamanism required to heal us in a restless
universe agitated in its smallest parts. Still, one might be skeptical, because it is most wonderful in
its very lack of explanatory power. Often its architecture seems merely good interior design. It is
shattered as the fruit dish of Paul Czanne. But the point of pointlessness is to be at once
shattered and whole, like the fruit dish of Czanne. We suffer through it as in its melancholy
scene of the eclipse of our clock. Time, our former absolute sun, now dreamily obscured by
theory. One is reminded of the trauma Einstein occasioned in his enduring witness to relativism.
Yet does not a sly dice-playing god reign over this essentially colIective dream theatre?

III

Wilson's new opera resembles Wallace Stevens's
"Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion"

It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,
In series X, Act IV, et cetera.

People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old.

The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihi,
Has lost the whole in which he was contained.

Knows desire without an object of desire
All mind and violence and nothing felt. .

He knows he hos nothing more to think about.
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

Aristotle has praised plot as an element more significant than diction. Wilson has almost
avoided diction in his drama and has made not a plotless theatre, as is supposed, but a theatre
that tends toward pure plot. The subject matter of his theatre, the subject of John Ashbery's
poetry, is simply the way things happen and happen to recur or not to recur in surprising and
*$&
parsimonious distributions. Thus redundancy or copiousness in both of these artists has such
effect. He has been praised and overpraised for his tableaux vivants/tableaux mort, but even this
element is not mere spectacle. Spectacle here has become plot, as in Francis Ponge and Boris
Pasternak, praised once by Ashbery for their religion of the exterior of things. John Northam has
done an extended study of stage settings in Hendrik Ibsen, how the painter Ibsen does more than
set a stage but calculates the interiority of all his designs. Each stage set is a galaxy of mental
images.

Wilson's designs seem about as cunning as a Cornell box and remind one of the usual bathos
accepted as theatrical design.

Wilson, his choreographer, and composer all delight in both minimum movementthe hand
on the table twitchingand the maximal orchestrated energyeight or more gymnasts loping in
drastic diagonals. Thus his theatre tends toward the whole palette and wants to register all
possibilities of that palette. This is a synthetic theatre.

From Jail to Jungle, 1967-1977*
*$'

The Work of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik

The idea of collaboration is not unknown in performance. The events of John Cage, Merce
Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as those of Allan Kaprow and various Fluxus
members, not to mention the work of Gilbert and George, Abramovi/Ulay, Robert Wilson and
Lucinda Childs more recently, and of countless others attest to this fact. One of the lengthiest and
most successful is the collaboration between the video artist Nam June Paik and the cellist Charlotte
Moorman. They have worked together, as well as separately, since 1964 and continue to do so.

Paik has created situations in which Ms. Moorman plays the cello in a gondola in Venice's
Grand Canal, on top of an amphibious landing craft in a jungle, dripping wet after having dived
into a tank of water, and in various costumes and masks, as well as in various states of undress. She
has even discarded her instrument altogether to "play" Paik as a "human cello." Together they have
pioneered new areas such as "video performance" and live "satellite performance." Perhaps their most
famous collaboration was on Paik's Opera Sextronique (1967), for which they were arrested,
jailed, tried, and found guilty of "an act which openly outrage[d] public decency." According to
Moorman, the case tested "'the limits of artistic censorship" and resulted "in the changing of that
law" for which they were arrested. Along with photographs of the performance and the arrest, the
judge's 10,000-word decision is reprinted here in an abbreviated form. In addition, there are
photographs of another Moorman/Paik collaboration, Guadalcanal Requiem (1976), and
Moorman's performances of pieces by other artists.

From New York Law Journal, May 11, 1967

PART 1E
by Judge Milton Shalleck.

PEOPLE &C., V. CHARLOTTE MOORMANEliminating all unnecessary accusatory
verbiage as surplusage, the charge against this adult female defendant is that at about
10:15 P.M. on February 9, 1967, in 125 West 41st Street, New York County, she "did
perform an act in which she did wilfully and lewdly expose her private parts in a theatre
where others were present" allegedly in violation of section 1140 of the Penal Law, and at
the same time committed a "violation of section 43 of the P. L. [by an] 'act which openly
outrages public decency'."

The setting and affidavit are simple. The supporting facts, later set forth, are also
uncomplicated. The problem presented is not, however. For it touches upon current
approach to a way of life which is puzzlingnot alone to observers but to those
participants who are striving to achieve what to them, too, is inexplicableor nearly so,
anyway.

If I were Mr. Sterne's Shandy I might write this entire opinion and decision in this vein and
style:
Among the more wondrous of God's many physical creations is that of human female
breasts. Both utilitarian and functional, they serve, at least, as a source for the lacteal
nourishment of tender new-born childrena most basic part in life. In the minds of many
the breasts are not less important for their attractiveness, sexually, in arousing libido in
the human male, with their consequent essential erotic role in male-female relations.

The pristine beauty of human female breasts has been immortalized by painters and
sculptors and writers of poetry and prose.

*$(
But in no poem, in no prose respected by the test of time have I read, in no valued oil,
in no statue or bust accepted for its imagery, technique and beauty as art, have I seen,
either visually described or portrayed, a picture of a nude or "topless" cellist in the act of
playing that instrumentor, for that matter, a similar description or portrayal of a
"topless" waitress with breast pendant over a plate of hot soup or cup of steaming coffee! I
wonder if anyone has.

What may be disturbing is "The Other Culture" led by that limited number
comprising the underground (as it is called)those "happeners" whose belief it is that art
is "supposed to change life" as most of us know it. A situation which impelled the London
Sunday Times to say that "The arts today, and especially the visual arts, are a kind of
brothel of the intellect

However "Events" or "Happenings" need not be so, even to the accepting minority.
They can just be an aspect of "The New Theatre," which has the "tendency to reduce or
eliminate the traditionally strong division of drama, dance, opera, etc." It is conglomerate.
It is a performance in which "Not only do the individual elements of a presentation
generate meaning, but each conveys
meaning to and receives it from the other elements."

One may ask: "What took place here to warrant police interference? The very first
witness, Officer Mandillo, described for defendant's first "piece" a fully darkened stage
and theatre when suddenly appeared three small light groupings on defendant (like
flashlight bulbs) which gave just sufficient illumination to outline her body. It appeared
nude to him. And where were the lights? One each attached to defendant's breasts and
one (he said) in the vicinity of defendant's vagina. She then played her cello. He thought
it was a Bach piece. Are further descriptive words necessary? Hieronymus Bosch could not
have painted a weirder picture than that testified to.

The greater number of this "select" audience "by invitation only" was lured to the
theatre by an announcement sent to them by mail. It consisted of a 13" x 8" paper on
which, in the background, was a photograph of defendant scantily clad in a bathing bikini
suit holding her cello and bow with her left hand. Superimposed thereon was printing, in
part proclaiming the defendant's playing on the night of February 9, 1967, of Mr. Paik's
Opera Sextronique and in less bold type stating that "after three emancipations in 20
th

century music (serial-indeterministic, actional)" she had "found
there is still one more chain to lose that is Pre-Freudian Hypocrisy." There then
follows in part:

''Why is sex a predominant theme in art and literature prohibited only in music?...
The purge of sex under the excuse of being 'serious' exactly undermines the so-called
'seriousness' of music as a classical art, ranking with literature and painting. Music history
needs its D. H. Lawrence, its Sigmund Freud."

Who could doubt, after reading this invitation that the acceptor was to witness the
unpurging of sex in "serious" music and the loosening of the chains which theretofore
had stifled the "predominant theme" of sex in music?

Defendant's testimony was clear. She was a "mixed-media artist emphasizing the cello."
She was inspired to her new kind of undertaking by John Cage in 1958. It gave her the
power to create "a non-musical sound"; and she so performed, uninhibited, in Germany,
Italy, Sweden and Denmark, where she was not arrested. One of the defendant's
expertsan art critic and columnist for an evening newspaper (who "cannot speak for
society at large)testified that defendant's performance serves in a "curious way," this
*$)
new kind of art of "events," "situations," "phenomena": that this experimentation in "terms
of sound has redeeming social values, for the "concert stage is dying."

Another of her experts was even more specific. He stated that the performance, which
he saw, was "an attempt to tweak the nose of our society relative to our difficulties with
sexual matters
especially with pubic matters and the breasts. We pretend they do not exist. Paik says
you are interested in these things. Here they are. I'll light them up for you. Wiring the
female body is a very fine irony. To point up these parts is of social value."

An assistant editor of a famous weekly, mostly pictorial, magazine, who specializes in
the art field of painting, sculpture, "mixed media dance," etc., thought the performance
which he saw was
"great wit." He "found it very amusing." He believed that it was "premeditated" and
"controlled; and although the "innocence of the naked figure can be despoiled" it was not
so here.

The present statute which is alleged to have been violated by the defendant is concise:

"A person who wilfully and lewdly exposes his person, or the private parts thereof, in
any public place, or in any place where others are present guilty of a misdemeanor"
(Penal Law, section 1140, in part).

I am, for all above, constrained to deny defendant's motion to dismiss for failure to
prove a prima facie case (which was reserved when the People rested) and to deny
defendant's motion to dismiss for failure, when both sides rested, to prove her guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt. I find her guilty of a violation of section 1140 of the Penal
Law, the remaining charge.

From The New York Times, May 14, 1967

OBSERVER: SEATED ONE DAY AT THE CELLO
by RUSSELL BAKER

WASHINGTON, May 13Naked above the waist, Miss Charlotte Moorman sought to
play the cello in a New York theater last February and was brought to justice, which, in the
person of Judge Milton Shalleck, found her guilty this week of indecent exposure.

In addition to receiving justice, however, Miss Moorman also received a judicial
lecture on the theory of clothing, during which Judge Shalleck again betrayed the man of
law's notorious innocence of the artistic process. Specifically, the judge suggested that
Pablo Casals would not "have become as great if he had performed nude from the waist
down."

This is a highly arguable proposition. Aside from its being incompetent, irrelevant,
and immaterial, there is not one scintilla of evidence to support it. For all we know, Casals
might have been even greater had he not been forced to keep a layer of wool between his
knees and his cello.

The judge's difficulty in the Moorman case seems to have arisen from an excess of zeal
to preserve musical clothing conventions, for his basic ruling seems to have been sound
enough. As anyone who has had to sit through a cello concert given by anyone much less
skilled than Casals must agree, his decision that Miss Moorman had committed indecent
exposure was undoubtedly justified.
*%+

DRESS IS IRRELEVANT

The crime has nothing to do with how a cellist dresses, however. It was not necessary,
as Judge Shalleck did, to go to the constitutional issue of clothing. The briefest
summation of the facts suffices to establish guilt. ("You attempted to give a cello concert
in public? "Yes, your honor." "Are you Pablo Casals?" "No, your Honor." "This court finds
you guilty of indecent exposure.")

The theory that the artist must dress in the costume of his trade is one of the heaviest
burdens the arts have to carry, and it is sad to see the judiciary fumble an opportunity to
free them from it.

The painter in his uncomfortable jeans and overstuffed hair, the writer in his shaggy
tweeds, the ad man in his monogrammed undershirtsall are victims of society's
insistence upon keeping its
creators in uniform; but the musician is the most abused of all.

If he wants to succeed in popular music, he is compelled to wear those ankle-high
shoes, skin-tight pants, and electronic shirts that the youthful record consumer insists
upon. If his field is Beethoven and Mahler, he has to dress like a penguin. If a woman, she
has to wear those long floor-length drapes associated with Count Dracula's ladies-in-
waiting.

As a consequence, people who want to hear them have to dress up to do so. After all,
if you are to be entertained by penguins you want to look at least as respectable as a
monkey. (Whence the term "monkey suit" for the uniform that audiences don to hear
Beethoven.)

The result has been to contribute to the aura of stuffiness that repels so many from
what is stuffily called "serious" music. If the orchestra is overdressed, we are invited to
believe, the music is "serious." From here it is an easy exercise in acrobatic logic to reach
Judge Shalleck's position that a musician with his pants on is a better musician than he is
with them off.

AT A CELLO CONCERT?

In convicting Miss Moorman, Judge Shalleck dismissed her artistic attainments by
stating that her performance was "born not of a desire to express art but to get the
vernacular sucker to come and be aroused." The mind boggles at the notion of even the
most vernacular sucker becoming aroused at a cello concert, but let that point pass and
suppose that Miss Moorman's performance had been critically acclaimed as one of
surpassing artistic excellence.

The question then becomes whether art out of costume is indecent. The answer we
will probably get is that no "serious" artist would perform without his artist's suit, and the
fact is that if he tried he would certainly be blackballed from the Serious Musician's
Association.

In our closed professional sects, we all insist on our colleagues wearing the uniform of
the trade painters in white overalls, journalists in gravy-stained neckties, doctors with
Cadillac shine on their trousers, rock-'n'-rollers in electronic shirts, bankers in pinstripes,
actors in ascots, lady cellists in Lady Dracula weeds.

*%*
IN THE SAME BOAT

Though violations are unlikely to be branded "indecent," the violator, no matter how
good he may be, will be advised that he could be even better at his trade if only he would
comply with the uniform regulations. And so, we are all in the same boat with Judge
Shalleck when he reasons that Casals would have been a poorer cellist without pants.

It is too bad about Miss Moorman. It would have been pleasant to relieve the
somnolence induced by cello concerts, but her crime was greater than indecent exposure.
She violated the Social Uniform Code.

* Pierre Restany's title for the tenth anniversary of Opera Sextronique and the premire of the
video tape Guadalcanal Requiem, February 10, 1977, at Carnegie Hall, New York.

*%"
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